
1.8; H[ 



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GOULH AND LINCOLN, 

59 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON, 

Would call particular attention to the following valuable works described 
in their Catalogue of Publications, viz. : 

Hugh Miller's Works. 

Bay»e»s Works. Walker's Works. Miall's Works. Bungener's Work. 

Animal of Scientific Discovery. Knight's Knowledge is Power. 

Krummacher's Suffering Saviour, 

Banvard's American Histories. The Aimwell Stories. 

Newcomb's Works. Tweedie's Works. Chambers's Works. Harris' Works. 

Kitto's Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature. 

Mrs. Knight's Life of Montgomery. Kitto's History of Palestine. 

Whewell's Work. Wayland's Works. Agassiz's Works. 




*.r.-ss*/r*:st 



Williams' Works. Guyot's Works. 

Thompson's Better Land. Kimball's Heaven. Valuable Works on Missions. 

Haven's Mental Philosophy. Buchanan's Modern Atheism. 

Cruden's Condensed Concordance. Eadie's Analytical Concordance. 

The Psalmist : a Collection of Hymns. 

Valuable School Books. Works for Sabbath Schools. 

Memoir of Amos Lawrence. 

Poetical Works of Milton, Cowper, Scott. Elegant Miniature Volumes. 

Arvine's Cyclopaedia of Anecdotes. 

Kipley's Notes on Gospels, Acts, and Romans. 

Sprague's European Celebrities. Marsh's Camel and the Hallig. 

Boget's Thesaurus of English Words. 

Hackett's Notes on Acts. M'Whorter's Yahveh Christ. 

StieDold and Stannius's Comparative Anatomy. Marcou's Geological Map, IT. S. 

Beligious and Miscellaneous Works. 

Works in the various Departments of Literature, Science and Art. 



SKETCH BOOK OF P OPULAR GEOLOG Y. 



POPULAR GEOLOGY: 



SERIES OF LECTURES READ BEFORE THE PHILOSOPHICAL 
INSTITUTION OF EDINBURGH. 



kuttylik 3ktt\p txam a ©Mflgisf s f 0rtMi0, 



B Y 

HUGH MILLER 
// 



WITH AN 

INTRODUCTORY RESUME OF THE PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE 
WITHIN THE LAST TWO YEARS, 

B Y 

MRS. MILLER. 



BOSTON: 

aOULD AND LINCOLN 

59 WASHINGTON STREET. 

NEW YORK: SHELDON AND COMPANY. 
CINCINNATI: GEORGE 8. BLANCHARD. 

1860. 



©$? 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by 
GOULD AND LINCOLN, 

Iu the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



ELECTROTYPED BY W. F. DRAPER, ANDOVER, MASS. 
PRINTED BY GEO. C. RAND & AVERY, BOSTON. 



By transfer 

NOV 1 19D5 



PREFACE 



TO 



THE AMERICAN EDITION 



This new volume, from the pen of Hugh Miller, is a legacy 
wholly unlooked for by the American public. It was known to many 
of his admirers on this side of the Atlantic that he had been labor- 
ing for years on a work designed to be the magnum opus of his life 
— "The Geology of Scotland." But his untimely death, it was 
supposed, had cut short his labors, and left the work in a state so 
fragmentary that his literary executors would not venture to publish 
it. The impression was a correct one, as related to the design of 
the author, in its magnitude and completeness. But the present 
volume supplies, to general readers, what the proposed work would 
have done for the scientific world. It gives the geological history 
of Scotland — and, with Scotland, of the world — in language intel- 
ligible to all, and with an affluence of anecdote, and incident, and 
literary allusion, in which Hugh Miller was without an equal 
among the scientific writers of our century. It gives precisely what 



II PREFACE. 

a multitude of readers in this country have been longing to find — 
a rational account of the manner in which all the strata of the 
earth's crust have been formed, from the foundation of unstratified 
granite and gneiss to the alluvial deposits of its surface. Scotland is 
literally taken to pieces, like a house of many stories; and one looks 
on the processes of the Divine Architect, as he would on the work 
of a human builder. The hypotheses (for they can be regarded 
only as such) are original, and curious, and plausible. Some read- 
ers may doubt their accuracy, but none will question the eminent 
ability with which they are developed. The volume will add to the 
reputation of the author, and the popularity of his writings; and 
will aid many, who have a slight acquaintance with geological science, 
to form habits of practical observation in their country rambles. 

The American Publishers have given the title of "Descriptive 
Sketches" to sundry papers which Mrs. Miller has selected from 
unpublished manuscripts of her husband, and to which, with charac- 
teristic modesty, she gave the simple name of "Appendix." They 
regarded these papers as an important part of the volume, and de- 
manding, from their intrinsic merits, a distinctive title. 

Boston, April, 1859. 



THE REV. ¥. S. SYHONDS, 

RECTOR OF PKlfDOCK, HEREFORDSHIRE. 



Dear Sir, 

Am I presuming too much on my position, as merely the editor 
of the following Lectures, when I ask leave to dedicate them to you? It is 
unquestionably a liberty with the production of another which only very pecu- 
liar circumstances can at all excuse. Yet, in the present case, I venture to 
think that those peculiar circumstances do exist; and I feel assured he would 
readily pardon me, whose work this is, and whose memory you so much revere. 
Without your cooperation, I believe that neither the " Cruise of the Betsey " 
nor these pages could by this time have seen the light. "When my own over- 
laden brain refused to do its duty, you gave me to hope, by offers of well- 
timed assistance, that the task before me might still be accomplished. Your 
friendly voice, often heard in tones of sympathizing inquiry when I was una- 
ble to endure your own or any other human presence, — even that of my dear 
child, — was for a time the only sound that brought to my heart any promise or 
cheer for the future. It was then, while unable to read the very characters in 
which they were written, that I put into your hands the papers containing 
"The Cruise" and "Ten Thousand Miles over the Fossiliferous Deposits of 
Scotland." You undertook the editorial duties connected with them con amore, 
and performed your task in a manner that left nothing to be desired. 

During the preparation of the present volume for the press, you have given 
me all the advantage of your ready stores of information, both in carefully 
scrutinizing the text to see where any addition was required in the form of 



IV DEDICATION. 

notes, and in referring me to the best authorities on every point regarding 
which I consulted you. And while so doing, you have confirmed my own 
judgment, — perhaps too liable to be swayed by partiality, — by expressing your 
conviction that this work is calculated to advance the reputation of its author. 
Long may you be spared to be, as now, the life and soul of those scientific 
pursuits so successfully carried on in your own district! Many a happy field- 
day may you enjoy in connection with that Society of which you are the hon- 
ored president. "Would that all associations throughout our country were as 
harmless in their methods of finding recreation, as invigorating to body and 
mind, and as beneficial in their results to the cause of science! In exploring 
the beautiful fields, and woods, and sunny slopes of Worcestershire, and Here- 
fordshire, in earnest and healthful communings with nature, and, I trust, with 
nature's God, — the perennial springs of whose bounty are seldom quaffed in 
this manner as they ought to be,— I trust that much, much happiness is in store 
for you and for the other gentlemen of the Malvern Club,* to whom, as well as 
to yourself, I owe a debt of grateful remembrance. 

And for the higher and nobler work which God has given you to do, may 
he grant you no stinted measure of his abundant grace, to enable you to per- 
form it aright. 

Ever believe me, dear Sir, 

Yours most faithfully, 

LYDIA MILLER. 



» The Malvern Club devotes stated periods,— monthly, I think,— to rambles over twenty or 
thirty miles of country, when the naturalists of whom it is composed, — botanists, geologists, 
etc.,— carry on the researches of their various departments separately, or in little groups of two 
or three, as they may desire. They all dine afterwards together at an inn, or farm-house, as the 
case may be, where they relate the adventures of the day, discuss their favorite topics, and com- 
pare their newly-found treasures. As a consequence of this, the Malvern Museum is a perfect 
model of what a local museum ought to be. There is no town or district of country where a 
few young men, possessing the advantage of an occasional holiday, might not thus associate 
themselves with the utmost advantage both to themselves and others. 



CONTENTS. 



Introductory Resume of the Progress of Geological Sci- 
ence, 11 



LECTURE FIRST. 

Junction of Geologic and Human History — Scottish History of Modern Date — 
The two periods previous to the Soman Invasion; the Stone Age and the 
Bronze Age — Geological Deposits of these Pre-historic Periods — The Aborig- 
inal Woods of Scotland — Scotch Mosses consequences of the Eoman Invasion 

— How Formed — Deposits, Natural and Artificial, found under them — The 
Sand Dunes of Scotland — Human Remains and Works of Art found in them 

— An Old Church Disinterred in 1835 on the Coast of Cornwall — Controversy 
regarding it — Ancient Scotch Barony underlying the Sand — The Old and 
New Coast Lines in Scotland — Where chiefly to be observed — Geology the 
Science of Landscape — Scenery of the Old and New Coast Lines — Date of the 
Change of Level from the Old to the New Coast Line uncertain — Beyond the 
Historic, but within the Human Period — Evidences of the fact in remains 
of Primitive Weapons and Ancient Boats — Changes of Level not rare events 
to the Geologist — Some of these enumerated — The Boulder-Clay — Its preva- 
lence in the Lowlands of Scotland — Indicated in the Scenery of the Country 

— The Scratchings on the Boulders accounted for — Produced by the Grating 
of Icebergs when Scotland was submerged — Direction in which Icebergs 
floated, from West to East — " Crag and Tail," the effect of it— Probable Cause 
of the Westerly Direction of the Current, 87-83 

1* 



VI CONTENTS 



LECTURE SECOND. 

Problem first propounded to the Author in a Quarry— The Quarry's Two De- 
posits, Old Red Sandstone and Boulder-Clay — The Boulder-Clay formed while 
the Land was subsiding — The Groovings and Polishings of the Rocks in the 
Lower Parts of the Country — Evidences of the fact— Sir Charles Lyell's Ob- 
servations on the Canadian Lake District — Close of the Boulder-Clay Record 
in Scotland —Its Continuance in England into the Pliocene Ages —The Trees 
and Animals of the Pre-Glacial Periods — Elephants' Tusks found in Scotland 
and England regarded as the Remains of Giants — Legends concerning them 
— Marine Deposits beneath the Pre-Glacial Forests of England — Objections of 
Theologians to the Geological Theory of the Antiquity of the Earth and of the 
Human Race considered — Extent of the Glacial Period in Scotland — Evi- 
dences of Glacial Action in Glencoe, Garelock, and the Highlands of Suther- 
land—Scenery of Scotland owes its Characteristics to Glacial Action — The 
Period of Elevation which succeeded the Period of Subsidence — Its Indica- 
tions in Raised Beaches and Subsoils — How the Subsoils and Brick Clays 
were formed — Their Economic Importance — Boulder-Stones interesting fea- 
tures in the Landscape — Their prevalence in Scotland — The more remarka- 
ble Ice-travelled Boulders described — Anecdotes of the " Travelled Stone of 
Petty" and the Standing-Stone of Torribal — Elevation of the Land during 
the Post-Tertiary Period which succeeded the Period of the Boulder-Clay — 
The Alpine Plants of Scotland the Vegetable Aborigines of the Country — 
Panoramic View of the Pleistocene and Post-Tertiary Periods — Modern Sci- 
ence not adverse to the Development of the Imaginative Faculty , . 84-124 



LECTURE THIRD. 

The Poet Delta (Dr. Moir) — His Definition of Poetry — His Death — His Burial- 
Place at Inveresk — Vision, Geological and Historical, of the surrounding 
Country — What it is that imparts to Nature its Poetry — The Tertiary Forma- 
tion in Scotland —In Geologic History all Ages contemporary —Amber the 
Resin of the Pinus Succinifer— A Vegetable Production of the Middle Tertiary 



CONTENTS. VII 

Ages— Its Properties and Uses — The Masses of Insects inclosed in it — The 
Structural Geology of Scotland — Its Trap Rock — The Scenery usually asso- 
ciated with the Trap Rock— How Formed —The Cretaceous Period in Scot- 
land — Its Productions — The Chalk Deposits — Death of Species dependent on 
Laws different from those which determine the Death of Individuals — The 
Two Great Infinites, 125-167 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



The Continuity of Existences twice broken in Geological History— The Three 
Great Geological Divisions representative of three Independent orders of Ex- 
istences — Origin of the Wealden in England — Its great Depth and high An- 
tiquity — The question whether the Weald Formation belongs to the Creta- 
ceous or the Oolite System determined in favor of the latter by its Position in 
Scotland — Its Organisms, consisting of both Salt and Fresh Water Animals, 
indicative of its Fluviatile Origin, but in proximity to the Ocean — The Out- 
liers of the Weald in Morayshire — Their Organisms — The Sabbath- Stone of 
the Northumberland Coal-Pits — Origin of its Name — The Framework of 
Scotland — The Conditions under which it may have been formed — The Lias 
and the Oolite produced by the last great Upheaval of its Northern Mountains 
— The Line of Elevation of the Lowland Counties — Localities of the Oolitic 
Deposits of Scotland — Its Flora and Fauna — History of one of its Pine 
Trees — Its Animal Organisms — A Walk into the Wilds of the Oolite Hills of 
Sutherland, 168-202 



LECTURE FIFTH. 

The Lias of the Hill of Eathie — The Beauty of its shores — Its Deposits, how 
formed — Their Animal Organisms indicative of successive Platforms of Exis- 
tences—The Laws of Generation and of Death— The Triassic System— Its 
Economic and Geographic Importance — Animal Footprints, but no Fossil 
Organisms, found in it — The Science of Ichnology originated in this fact — 
Illustrated by the appearance of the Compensation Pond, near Edinburgh, 



VIII CONTENTS. 

in 1842 — The Phenomena indicated by the Foot-prints in the Triassic System 
— The Triassic and Permian Systems once regarded as one, under the name of 
the New Red Sandstone — The Coal Measures in Scotland next in Order of 
Succession to the Triassic System — Differences in the Organisms of the two 
Systems — Extent of the Coal Measures of Scotland — Their Scenic Peculiari- 
ties — Ancient Flora of the Carboniferous Period — Its Fauna— Its Reptiles 
and Reptile Fishes — The other Organisms of the Period — Great Depth of 
the System— The Processes by which, during countless Ages, it had been 
formed, 203-248 



LECTURE SIXTH. 

Remote Antiquity of the Old Red Sandstone — Suggestive of the vast Tracts of 
Time with which the Geologist has to deal — Its great Depth and Extent in 
Scotland and England — Peculiarity of its Scenery — Reflection on first dis- 
covering the Outline of a Fragment of the Asterolepis traced on one of its 
Rocks — Consists of Three Distinct Formations — Their Vegetable Organisms 
— The Caithness Flagstones, how formed — The Fauna of the Old Red Sand- 
stone — The Pterichthys of the Upper or Newest Formation — The Cephalaspis 
of the Lower Formation — The Middle Formation the most abundant in Or- 
ganic Remains — Destruction of Animal Life in the Formation sudden and 
violent — The Asterolepis and Coccosteus — The Silurian the Oldest of the 
Geologic Systems— That in which Animal and Vegetable Life had their 
earliest beginnings — The Theologians and Geologists on the Antiquity of the 
Globe — Extent of the Silurian System in Scotland — The Classic Scenery of 
the country situated on it — Comparatively Poor in Animal and Vegetable 
Organisms— The Unfossiliferous Primary Rocks of Scotland — Its Highland 
S5'enery formed of them — Description of Glencoe — Other Highland Scenery 
glanced at — Probable Depth of the Primary Stratified Rocks of Scotland — 
How deposited— Speculations of Philosophers regarding the Processes to which 
the Earth owes its present Form— The Author's views on the subject, 249-298 



CONTENTS OF DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES. 



Page 
ACCUMULATIONS OP SHELLS, PHENOMENA EXPLANATORY OP .340 

AMMONITES OP THE NORTHERN LIAS ..... 348 

ASTREA OP THE OOLITE, SUTHERLAND . . . . .309 

BELEMNITES OP THE NORTHERN LIAS ..... 349 

BONE-BED, RECENT, IN THE FORMING ..... 302 

BRAAMBURY, QUARRY OP, UPPER OOLITE, SUTHERLAND . . 316 

BREWSTER, SIR DAVID, ON THE CUTTLE-FISH AND BELEMNITE . . 372 

BRORA COAL FIELD OTHER THAN THE TRUE COAL-MEASURES . 311 

BRORA PEAT-MOSSES OP THE OOLITE ...... 315 

CAUTION TO GEOLOGISTS ON THE FINDING OF REMAINS . . 342 

CLAY-BED OF THE NORTHERN 8UTOR, LESSON TO YOUNG GEOLOGISTS . 336 

CONGENERS OF THE CUTTLE-FISH, BELEMNITE, ETC. . . . 357 

COPROLITES OF THE LIAS ....... 365 

CROMARTY ......... 328 

CROMARTY, CAVES OF, OR THE ART OF SEEING OVER THE ART OP THEO- 
RIZING ......... 329 

CROMARTY SUTOR, LINE OP ....... 335 

CUTTLE-FISH ......... 349 

DIPTERUS MACROLEPIDOTUS, ABUNDANT IN THE BANNISKIRK OLD RED 

OF CAITHNESS ........ 304 

EATHIE, INTRUSIVE DIKES OF ...... . 366 

ECONOMIC GEOLOGY, LONDON MUSEUM OP . . . .313 

FOSSIL-WOOD OF THE OOLITE AT HELMSDALE, SUTHERLAND . . 306 



X CONTENTS. 

GANOID SCALES AND RAYS . . . . . . .301 

GLACIAL APPEARANCES AT NIGG AND LOGIE .... 338 

GLACIERS AND MORAINES OP SUTHERLAND .... 319 

GRANITIC GNEISS AND SANDSTONE, WITH THE CONDITIONS OP THEIR 

UPHEAVAL ........ 345 

LEVEL STEPPES OP RUSSIA, AND THEORY OP MORAINES . ..324 

SEPTARIA, OR CEMENT-STONES, OP THE LIAS .... 347 

TEREBUATULA, CONTEMPORARY AND EXTINCT TYPES OP THE LIFE OP 370 

TRAVELLED BOULDERS NOT ASSOCIATED WITH CLAY . . . 344 

TYPES, RECENT, OP FOSSILS ....... 310 

UNDERLYING CLAY ON LEVEL MOORS, REMARKS ON . ...'•• 343 



THEORY OF THE OCEAN'S LEVEL ...... 375 

CHAIN OP CAUSES ........ 383 

RECENT GEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES ...... 409 

SIR RODERICK MURCHISON ON THE RECENT GEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES 

IN MORAYSHIRE ........ 419 



INTRODUCTORY RESUME 



OF THE 



PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 



The following Lectures, with " The Cruise of the Betsey," 
and " Rambles of a Geologist," are all that remain of what 
Hugh Miller once designed to be his Maximum Opus, — The 
Geology of Scotland. It is well, however, that his ma- 
terials have been so left that they can be presented to the 
public in a shape perfectly readable ; furnishing two volumes, 
each of which, it is hoped, will be found to possess in itself a 
uniform and intrinsic interest — differing in matter and man- 
ner as much as they do in the form in which they have found 
an embodiment. That form is simply the one naturally arising 
out of the circumstances of the Author's life as they occurred, 
instead of the more artificial plan designed by himself, in which 
these circumstances would probably, more or less, if not alto- 
gether, have disappeared. Yet it may well be doubted whether 



12 INTRODUCTORY RESUME: 

the natural method does not possess a charm which any more 
formal arrangement would have wanted. Every one must be 
struck with the freshness, buoyancy, and vigor displayed in the 
" Summer Rambles;" — qualities more apparent in these than 
even in his more labored Autobiography, of which they are, 
indeed, but a sort of unintentional continuation. They were 
the spontaneous utterances of a mind set free from an occu- 
pation never very congenial, — that of writing compulsory 
articles for a newspaper, — to find refreshment amid the fami- 
liar haunts in which it delighted, and to seize, with a grasp 
easy, yet powerful, on the recreation of a favorite science, as 
the artist seizes on the pencil from which he has been sepa- 
rated for a time, or the musician on some instrument much 
loved and long lost, which he well knows will, as it yields to 
him its old music, restore vigor and harmony to his entire 
being. My dear husband did, indeed, bring to his science all 
that fondness, while he found in it much of that kind of 
enjoyment, which we are wont to associate exclusively with the 
love of art. 

The delivery of these Lectures may not yet have passed 
quite away from the recollection of the Edinburgh public. 
They excited unusual interest, and awakened unusual atten- 
tion, in a city where interest in scientific matters, and attend- 
ance upon lectures of a very superior order, are affairs of 
every-day occurrence. Rarely have I seen an audience so 



PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 13 

profoundly absorbed. And at the conclusion of the whole, 
when the lecturer's success had been triumphantly established 
(for it must be remembered that lecturing was to him an 
experiment made late in life), I ventured to urge the propriety 
of having the series published before the general interest had 
begun to subside. His reply was, " I cannot afford it. I have 
given so many of my best facts and broadest ideas, — - so much, 
indeed, of what would be required to lighten the drier details 
in my ' Geology of Scotland,' — that it would never do to pub- 
lish these Lectures by themselves." It will thus be seen that 
they veritably gather into one luminous centre the best por- 
tions of his contemplated work, garnering very much of what 
was most vivid in painting and original in conception, — of 
that which has now, alas ! glided, with himself, into those 
silent shades where dwell the souls of the departed, with the 
halo of past thought hovering dimly round them, waiting for 
that new impulse from the Divine Spirit which is to quicken 
them into an intenser and higher unity. 

I have been led to indulge the hope that this work will be 
found useful in giving to elementary Geology a greater attrac- 
tiveness in the eyes of the student than it has hitherto pos- 
sessed. It was characteristic of the mind of its author, that he 
valued words, and even facts, as only subservient to the high 
powers of reason and imagination. It is to be regretted that 
many introductory works, especially those for the use of 

2 



14 INTRODUCTORY RESUME: 

schools, should be so crammed with scientific terms, and facts 
hard packed, and not always well chosen, that they are fitted 
to remind us of the dragon's teeth sown by Jason, which sprung 
up into armed men, — being much more likely to repel, than 
to allure into the temple of science. One might, indeed, as 
well attempt to gain an acquaintance with English literature 
solely from the study of Johnson's Dictionary, as to acquire an 
insight into the nature of Geology from puzzling over such 
books. But, viewed in the light of a mind which had ap- 
proached the subject by quite another pathway, all unconscious, 
in its outset, of the gatherings and recordings of others, and 
which never made a single step of progression in which it was 
not guided by the light of its own genius and the inspiration 
of nature, it may be regarded by beginners in another aspect, 
— one very different from that in which Wordsworth looked 
upon it when he thanked Heaven that the covert nooks of 
nature reported not of the geologist's hands, — " the man who 
classed his splinter by some barbarous name, and hurried on." 
At that time the poet must have seen but the cold, hard profile 
of the man, instead of the broad, beaming, full-orbed glance 
which he may have cast over the wondrous aeons of the past 
eternity. 

To meet any difficulties arising from misconception, it may 
be proper to glance rapidly at what has been accomplished in 
geological research within the last two years. The reader will 



PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 15 

thus avoid the painful impression that there are any suppressed 
facts of recent date which clash with the theories of the suc- 
ceeding Lectures, destroying their value and impairing their 
unity. And it may be well to remind him that there are two 
schools of Geology, quite at one in their willingness to bring 
all theories to the test of actual discovery, but widely differing 
in their leanings as to the mode in which, a priori, they would 
wish the facts brought to light to be viewed. The one, as 
expounded in the following Lectures, delights in the unfolding 
of a great plan, having its original in the Divine Mind, which 
has gradually fitted the earth to be the habitation of intelligent 
beings, and has introduced upon the stage of time organism 
after organism, rising in dignity, until all have found their 
completion in the human nature, which, in its turn, is a 
prophecy of the spiritual and Divine. This may be said to 
be the true development hypothesis, in opposition to the false 
and puerile one, which has been discarded by all geologists 
worthy of the name, of whatsoever side. The other school 
holds the opinion — though, perhaps, not very decidedly — 
that all things have been from the beginning as they are now ; 
and that if evidence at the present moment leans to the side of 
a gradual progress and a serial development, it is because so 
much remains undiscovered ; the hiatus, wherever it occurs, 
being always in our own knowledge, and not in the actual state 
of things. The next score of years will probably bring the 
matter to a pretty fair decision ; for it seems impossible that, 



16 INTRODUCTORY RESUME: 

if so many able workers continue to be employed as industri- 
ously as now in the same field, the remains of man and the 
higher mammals will not be found to be of all periods, if at all 
periods they existed. In the meantime, it is well to know the 
actual point to which discovery has conducted us ; and this I 
have taken every pains most carefully to ascertain. 

The Upper Ludlow rocks — the uppermost of the Silurians 
— continue to be the lowest point at which fish are found. 
Up to that period, — during the vast ages of the Cambrian, 
where only the faintest traces of animal life have been de- 
tected 1 in the shape of annelides or sand-boring worms, — 
throughout the whole range of the Silurians, where shell-fish 
and crustaceans, with inferior forms of life abounded, — no 
traces of fish, the lowest vertebrate existences until the 
latest formed beds of the Upper Silurian, have yet appeared. 
There are now six genera of fish ranked as Upper Silurian, — 
Auchenaspis, Cephalaspis, Pteraspis, Plectrodus, Onchus Mur- 
chisoni, and Sphagodus. The two latter — Onchus Murchisoni 
and Sphagodus — are represented by bony defences, such as 
are possessed by placoid fishes of the present day. Sir Rod- 
erick Murchison at one time entertained the idea of placing 
the Ludlow bone-bed at the base of the Old Red Sandstone ; 
but its fish having been found decidedly associated with Silu- 
rian organisms, this idea has been abandoned. 

1 See the lately published edition of Sir Roderick Murchison's " Siluria," 
chap. ii. p. 26. 



PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 17 

The next point to which public attention has been specially 
directed, is the discovery of mammals lower than they had 
formerly appeared. Considerable misconception has arisen on 
this head. The Middle Purbeck beds, recently explored by 
Mr. Beckles, in which various small mammals were found, 
occur considerably farther up than the Stonesfield slates, in 
which the first quadruped was detected so far back as 1818. 
But this discovery involves no theoretical change, inasmuch as 
all the mammalian remains of the Middle Purbecks consist of 
small marsupials and insectivora, varying in size from a rat to 
a hedgehog, with one or two doubtful species, not yet proved 
to be otherwise. The living analogue of one very interesting 
genus is the kangaroo rat, which inhabits the prairies and 
scrub-jungles of Australia, feeding on plants and scratched-up 
roots. Between the English Stonesfield or Great Oolite, in 
which, many years ago, four species of these small mammals 
were known to exist, and the Middle Purbeck, quarried by 
Mr. Beckles, in which fourteen species are now found, there 
intervene the Oxford Clay, Coral Rag, Kimmeridge Clay, 
Portland Oolite, and Lower Purbeck Oolite ; and then, after 
the Middle Purbeck, there occurs a great hiatus throughout 
the Weald, Green Sand, Gault, and Chalk, wherein no quad- 
rupedal remains have been found ; until at length we are 
introduced, in the Tertiary, to the dawn of the grand mamma- 
lian period; so that nothing. has occurred in this department 
to occasion any revolution in the ideas of those who, with my 

2* 



18 INTRODUCTORY RESUME: 

husband, consider a succession and development of type to be 
the one great fixed law of geological science. The reader will 
see that in the end of Lecture Third such remains as have 
been found lower than the Tertiary are expressly recognized 
and excepted. " Save," says the author, " in the dwarf and 
inferior forms of the marsupials and insectivora, not any of the 
honest mammals have yet appeared." 

But while attaching no importance to the discoveries in the 
Middle Purbeck, except in regard of more ample numerical 
development, it is necessary to admit the evidence of marsu- 
pials having been found lower than the Stonesfield or Great 
Oolite; even so far back as the Upper Trias, the Keuper 
Sandstone of Germany, which lies at the base of the Lias. I 
must be permitted, on this point, to quote the authority of Sir 
Roderick Murchison, as one of the safest and most cautious 
exponents of geological fact. " In that deposit," says he, 
referring to the Keuper Sandstone of Wurtemberg, " the 
relics of a solitary small marsupial mammal have been ex- 
humed, which its discoverer, Plieninger, has named Microlestes 
Antiquus. Again, Dr. Ebenezer Emmons, the well-known 
geologist, of Albany, in the United States, has described, from 
the lower beds of the Chatham Secondary Coal-field, North 
Carolina (of the same age as those of Virginia, and probably 
of the Wurtemberg Keuper), the jaws of another minute mam- 
mal, which he calls Bromotherium Sylvestre. Lastly, while I 



PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 19 

write, Mr. C. Moore has detected in an agglomerate which 
fills the fissures of the carboniferous limestone near Frome, 
Somersetshire, the teeth of marsupial mammals, one of which 
he considers to be closely related to the Microlestes Antiquus 
of Germany, and Professor Owen confirms the fact. From 
that coincidence, and also from the association with other ani- 
mal remains, — the Placodus (a reptile of the Muschelkalk), 
and certain mollusca, — Mr Moore believes that these patches 
represent the Keuper of Germany. If this view should be 
sustained, this author, who has already made remarkable 
additions to our acquaintance with the organic remains of the 
Oolitic rocks and the Lias, will have had the merit of having 
discovered the first traces of mammalia in any British stratum 
below the Stonesfield slates." . . . . " Let me entreat," 
says Sir Roderick, in a passage occurring shortly after that we 
have quoted, " Let me entreat the reader not to be led by the 
reasoning of the ablest physiologist, or by an appeal to minute 
structural affinities, to impugn the clear and exact facts of a 
succession from lower to higher grades of life in each forma- 
tion. Let no one imagine that because the bony characters in 
the jaw and teeth of the Plagiaulax of the Purbeck strata are 
such as the comparative anatomist might have expected to find 
among existing marsupials, and that the animal is, therefore, 
far removed from the embryonic archetype, such an argument 
disturbs the order of succession of classes, as seen in the crust 
of the earth." So far from disturbing the order of succession, 



20 INTRODUCTORY RESUME: 

it is, we conceive, of exceeding interest to find the Mesozoic 
period marked in its commencement, as it most probably will 
be found to be, by the introduction of a form of being so 
entirely different from any that preceded it. It seems to us to 
bring the true development hypothesis into a clearer and more 
harmonious unity. The great period during which the little 
annelide or sand-boring worm was the sole tenant of this wide 
earth, — its first inhabitant after the primeval void, — has 
passed. The aeon of the Mollusc and the Crustacean follows. 
At its close appear the first fishes, very scanty in point of 
numbers and of species, but multiplying into many genera, 
and swarming in countless myriads, as the Devonian ages wear 
on. Again, towards the termination of the latter, appear the 
first reptiles, which, during the Carboniferous and Permian 
eras, reign as the master-existences of creation. But Palaeozic 
or ancient life passes away, and the Mesozoic or Middle period 
is marked not only by countless forms, all specifically, and 
many of them generically, new, but by another wholly un- 
known, either as genus or species, during all the past. The 
little marsupials and insectivora appear "perfect after their 
kind," and yet only the harbingers of the great mammalian 
period which is yet to come. In the volume of Creation, as 
in that of Providence, God's designs are wrapt in profound 
mystery until their completion. And yet in each it would 
appear that He sends a prophetic messenger to prepare the 



PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 21 

way, in which the clear-sighted eye, intent to read His pur- 
poses, may discern some sign of the approaching future. 

Before we proceed, we must here, on behalf of the un- 
learned, and therefore the more easily misled, most humbly 
venture to reclaim against the use, on the part of men of the 
very highest standing, of the loose and dubious phraseology in 
which they sometimes indulge, and which serves greatly to 
perplex, if not to lead to very erroneous conclusions. 

"In respect to no one class of animals," says Professor 
Owen, in his last Address to the British Association, "has 
the manifestation of creative force been limited to one epoch 
of time." This, translated into fact, can only mean that the 
vertebrate type had its representative in the fish of the earliest 
or Silurian epoch, and has continued to exist throughout all 
the epochs which succeeded it. But the difficulty lies in the 
translation ; for, at first sight, the conclusion is inevitable, to 
the general reader, that not only the lowest class of vertebrate 
existence, but also man and the higher mammals, had been 
found from the beginning, and that the highest and the lowest 
forms of being were at all periods contemporary. No one, 
surely, would have a right to make such a prodigious stride in 
the line of inference, on the presumption of supposed evidence 
yet to come. Again, Sir Charles Lyell, in his supplement to 
the fifth edition of his " Elementary Geology," says, in speak- 



22 INTRODUCTORY RESUME: 

ing of these same Purbeck beds quarried by Mr. Beckles, 
" They afford the first positive proof, as yet obtained, of the 
coexistence of a varied fauna of the highest class of vertebrata 
with that ample development of reptile life which marks the 
periods from the Trias to the Lower Cretaceous inclusive." 
Are marsupials and insectivora the highest class of vertebrata? 
"Where, then, do the great placental mammals — where does 
man himself — take rank ? 

It were surely to be desired that some stricter and more 
invariable form of phraseology were adopted, either in accord- 
ance with the divisions of Cuvier, or some analogous system, 
adherence to which would be clearly defined and understood. 
Why should not the words class, order, type, have as invariable 
a meaning as genera and species, which, having an application 
more limited, are seldom mistaken? We are aware that such 
terms are often used by the learned in an indefinite and trans- 
latable sense, just as to the learned in languages it may be a 
matter of indifference whether the written characters which 
convey information to them be Roman, Hebrew, or Chinese. 
But it should be remembered that there is a large class outside 
which seeks to be addressed in a plain vernacular — which 
asks, first of all, definiteness in the use of terms to which prob- 
ably they have already sought to attach some fixed sense ; and 
that it is not well to unship the rudder of their thought, and 
Bend them back to sea again. 






PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 23 

The next point which demands attention in our short resume 
is that great break between the Permian and Triassic systems, 
across which, as stated in the following pages, not a single 
species has found its way. Much attention has been given to 
the great Hallstad or St. Cassian beds, which lie on the north- 
ern and southern declivities of the Austrian Alps. These beds 
belong to the Upper Trias, and they contain more genera com- 
mon to Palaeozoic and newer rocks than were formerly known. 
There are ten genera peculiarly Triassic, ten common to older, 
and ten to newer strata. Among these, the most remarkable 
is the Orthoceras, which was before held to be altogether 
Palaeozoic, but is here found associated with the Ammonites 
and Belemnites of the secondary period. 1 The appearance of 
this, with a few other familiar forms, serves, in our imagina- 
tion at least, to lessen the distance, and, in some small measure, 
to bridge over the chasm, between Palaeozoic and Secondary 
life. And yet, considering the vast change which then passed 
over our planet, — that all specific forms died out, while new 
ones came to occupy their room, — the discovery of a few more 
connecting generic links in the rudimentary shell-alphabet, 
which serve but to show that in all changes the God of the 
past is likewise the God of the present, no more affects in 
reality this one great revolution, the completeness of which is 
marked by the very difficulty of finding, amid so much new 

i See Sir Charles Lyell's " Supplement " for corroboration of the forego- 
ing: statements. 



24 INTRODUCTORY RESUME: 

and redundant life, a single identical specific variety, than the 
well-known existence of the Terebratula in the earliest, as well 
as in the existing seas, can efface the great ground-plan of 
successive geological eras. 1 Nor does it explain the matter to 
say that geographical changes took place, bringing with them 
the denizens of different climates, and adapted for different 
modes of life. The same Almighty Power which now pro- 
vides habitats and conditions suitable for the wants of his 
creatures, would, doubtless, have done so during all the past. 
Geographical changes are at all times indissolubly connected 
with changes in the conditions of being ; and they serve, in so 
far, to explain the rule in the stated order of geological events, 
when a due proportion of extinct and of novel forms are found 
coexistent. But how can they explain the exception ? A 
singular effect must have a singular cause. And when we 
find that there were changes relating to the world's inhabitants 
altogether singular and abnormal in their revolutionary char- 
acter, we must infer that the medial causes of which the Crea- 
tor made use were of a singular and abnormal character also. 
On this head the best-informed ought to speak with extreme 
diffidence. We can but imagine that there may have been a 
long, immeasurable period, during which a subsidence, so to 
speak, took place in the creative energy, and during which all 
specific forms, one after another, died out, — the lull of a dying 

1 See Terebratula, page 111. The extinct Terebratula is now called 
Rhynconella. 



PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 25 

creation, — and then a renewal of the impulsive force from 
that Divine Spirit which brooded over the face of the earliest 
chaotic deep, producing geographical changes, more or less 
rapid, which should prepare the way for the next stage in our 
planetary existence, — its new framework, and its fresh burden 
of vital beings. 

The other great break in the continuity of fossils, which 
occurs between the Chalk and the Tertiary, seems to be very 
much in the same condition with that of which we have just 
spoken. New connecting genera have been discovered, but 
still not a single identical species. Jukes, in his " Manual," 
published at the end of last year, says : " Near Maestricht, in 
Holland, the chalk, with flint, is covered by a kind of chalky 
rock, with gray flints, over which are loose, yellowish lime- 
stones, sometimes almost made up of fossils." Similar beds 
also occur at Saxoe in Denmark. Together with true creta- 
ceous fossils, such as pecten and quadricostatus, these beds 
contain species of the genera Yoluta, Fasciolaria, Cyprea, 
Oliva, etc., etc., several of which genera are also found else- 
where in the Tertiary rocks. 1 

Sir Roderick Murchison's late explorations in the Highlands 
— although, of course, local in their character — have made a 



1 A doubt has, nevertheless, been expressed whether these are not bro* 
ken-up Tertiaries. 

3 



26 INTRODUCTORY RESUME: 

considerable change in the Geology of Scotland. The 
next edition of the " Old Red Sandstone " will be the most fit- 
ting place to speak of these at length ; and I have some reason 
to believe that Sir Roderick himself will then favor me with a 
communication giving some account of them. Suffice it at 
present to say, that the supposed Old Red Conglomerate of the 
Western Highlands, as laid down in the year 1827 by Sir 
Roderick himself, accompanied by Professor Sedgwick, and so 
far acquiesced in by my husband, although he always wrote 
doubtfully on the subject, has now been ascertained to be, not 
Old Red, but Silurian. In Sir Roderick's last Address to the 
British Association, he says : " Professor Sedgwick and him- 
self had, thirty-one years ago, ascertained an ascending order 
from gneiss, covered by quartz rocks, with limestone, into 
overlying quarizo:e, micaceous, and other crystalline rocks, 
some of which have a gneissose character. They had also 
observed what they supposed to be an associated formation of 
red grit and sandstone ; but the exact relations of this to the 
crystalline rocks was not ascertained, ow'ng to bad weather. 
In the meantime, they, as well as all subsequent geologists, had 
erred'in believing the great and lofty masses of purple and red 
conglomerate of the western coast were of the same age as 
those on the east, and therefore 'Old Red Sandstone.' . . . 
Professor Nicol had suggested that the quartzites and lime- 
stones might be the equivalent of the Carboniferous system of 
the south of Scotland. Wholly dissenting from that hypoth- 



PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 27 

esis, he (Sir Roderick) had urged Mr. Peach to avail himself 
of his first leisure moments to reexamine the fossil-beds of 
Durness and Assynt, and the result was the discovery of so 
many forms of undoubted Lower Silurian characters (deter- 
mined by Mr. Salter), that the question has been completely 
set at rest — there being now no less than nineteen or twenty 
species of M'Lurea, Murchisonia, Cephalita, and Orthoceras, 
with an Orthis, etc., of which ten or eleven occur in the 
Lower Silurian rocks of North America." 

This change would demand an entirely new map of the 
Geology of Scotland ; for there is clearly ascertained to be an 
ascending series from west to east, beginning with an older or 
primitive gneiss, on which a Cambrian conglomerate, and over 
that again a band containing the Silurian fossils, rest ; while a 
younger gneiss occupies a portion of the central nucleus, hav- 
ing the Old Red Sandstone series on the eastern side. A 
change has likewise been made in the internal arrangements 
of the Old Red, of which the next edition of my husband's 
work on the subject will be the proper place to speak in detail. 
In the meantime, I may just mention, that the Caithness and 
Cromarty beds have been found to occupy, not the lowest, but 
the central place, — the lowest being assigned to the Forfar- 
shire beds, containing Cephalaspis, associated with Pteraspis, 
an organism characteristically Silurian. That which bears 
most upon the subject before us, is the now perfectly ascer- 



28 INTRODUCTORY RESUME: 

tained imprint of the footsteps of large reptiles in the Elgin or 
uppermost formation of the Old Red. A shade of doubt had 
rested upon the discovery made many years ago by Mr. Pat- 
rick Duff, of the Telerpeton Elginense, not as to the real nature 
of the fossil, which is indisputably a small lizard, but as to 
whether the stratum in which it was found belonged to the 
Old Red, or to the formation immediately above it. It will be 
observed, however, that the existence of reptiles in the Old 
Red did not rest altogether upon this, because the footprints 
of large animals of the same class had been ascertained in the 
United States of America. I cannot but conceive, therefore, 
that Mr. Duff, in a recent letter or paper read in Elgin, and 
published in the Elgin and Morayshire Courier, makes too 
much of the recent discoveries in his neighborhood, when he 
asserts that the Old Red Sandstone had been hitherto consid- 
ered exclusively a fish formation, and that the appearance of 
reptiles is altogether novel. " Now," says he, " that the Old 
Red Sandstones of Moray have acquired some celebrity, it 
may not be unprofitable to trace the different stages by which 
the discovery was arrived at of reptilian remains in that very 
ancient system, which till now was held to have been peopled by 
no higher order of beings than fishes." Mr. Duff forgets that 
in the programme, as it may be called, given by my husband, 
of the introduction of different types of animal life, as ascer- 
tained in his day, reptiles are made to occupy precisely the 
position they do now. To refresh the memory of the reader, 






PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 



29 



I shall here reproduce it, as given in the " Testimony of the 
Rocks." At page 45 is this diagram : 



Silurian. 
Old Red. 

Carboniferous. 

Fermian. 
Triassic 

Oolitic. 
Cretaceous. 

Tertiary. 
Recent. 



Rad. Art. Mol. 

Fishes. 

Reptiles. 



Birds. 
Mammals. 



Pla. Mam. 



IE Man. 



Geologic [Rad. Art. Mol. Fish. Rep. Bird. Mam. Man.] arrangement. 
Cuvier's [Rad. Art. Mol. Fish. Rep. Bird. Mam. Man.] arrangement. 



THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS 



And on the following page occurs this comment : " In the 
many-folded pages of the Old Red Sandstone, till we reach the 
highest and last, there occur the remains of no other verte- 
brates than those of this fourth class [fishes] ; but in its upper- 
most deposits there appear traces of the third or reptilian class ; 
and in passing upwards still, through the Carboniferous, Per- 
mian, and Triassic systems, we find reptiles continuing the 
master-existences of the time." And at page 104, express 
allusion is made to the Telerpeton Elginense, with the doubt 

3* 



30 INTRODUCTORY RESUME: 

as to the nature of its locale very slightly touched upon. 1 All 
this Mr. Duff has forgotten, apparently ; and it appears like- 
wise not to have come within his cognizance that Sir Charles 
Lyell distinctly recognizes his Telerpeton, as well as the 
American foot-prints, and assigns both their proper places, in 
the last edition of his " Principles." Even in the edition before 
the last of the rt Siluria," almost the first thing that meets us, on 
opening it at Chapter Tenth, which treats of the Old Red 
Sandstone, is a print of the fossil skeleton of this same Teler- 
peton Mginense — its true place assigned to it with quite as 
much certainty as now ! These very singular lapses in mem- 
ory seem not to be peculiar to Mr. Duff. I have seen it 
stated, in an anonymous article published in a widely-circu- 
lated journal, 2 and in connection with the discovery of the 
Elgin reptile foot-prints, that Hugh Miller considered the Old 
Red Sandstone to have been a shoreless ocean without a tree ! 3 
— utterly ignoring the fact that he was himself the discoverer 
of the first Old Red fossil- wood of a coniferous character, and 

1 This doubt, I see by Sir Roderick Murchison's latest Address to the 
British Association, is not yet entirely obviated. See page 422. 

2 For this article, as an excellent specimen of its class, see page 409, 
under the head "Recent Geological Discoveries;" and, in contradistinction 
to it, the extract from Sir R. Murchison's Address ought to 'be carefully 
studied. I myself had seen neither that extract, nor the recent " Siluria," 
until after this short sketch was in type,— the references to the latter hav- 
ing been introduced afterwards,— and it may be conceived with what feel- 
ings of gratification I have perused Sir Roderick's repeated assurances of 
adherence to the " Old Light." 

8 See Contra, p. 246. 



PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 31 

that he thence expressly infers the then existence of vegetation 
of a high order. Is it not enough to add to the store of 
knowledge without attempting to undermine all that has gone 
before ? Must the discovery of an additional reptile, a few 
additional marsupials, be the signal for the immediate outcry, 
" All is changed ; the former things have passed away ; all 
things have become new ? " My husband was solicitous even 
to the point of nervous anxiety to exclude from his writings 
every particle of error, whether of facts, or of the conclusions 
to be drawn from them. Much rather would he never have 
written at all than feel himself in any degree a false teacher. 
" Truth first, come what may afterwards," was his invariable 
motto. In the same spirit, God enabling me, I have been 
desirous to carry on the publication of his posthumous writ- 
ings. God forbid that one entrusted with such sacred guar- 
dianship should seek to pervert or suppress a single truth, 
actual or presumptive, even though its evidence were to over- 
throw, in a single hour, all his much-loved speculations — all 
his reasonings, so long cogitated, so conscientiously wrought 
ought. Yet I must confess that I was at first startled and 
alarmed by rumors of changes and discoveries, which, I was 
told, were to overturn at once the science of Geology as hith- 
erto received, and all the evidences which had been drawn 
from it in favor of revealed religion. Though well persuaded 
that at ah times, and by the most unexpected methods, the Most 
High is able to assert Himself, the proneness of man to make 



32 INTRODUCTORY RESUME: 

use of every unoccupied position in order to maintain his 
independence of his Maker, seemed about to gain new vigor 
by acquiring a fresh vantage-ground. The old cry of the 
eternity of matter, and the " all things remain as they were 
from the beginning until now," rung in my ears. God with 
us, in the world of science henceforth to be no more ! The 
very evidences of His being seemed about to be removed into 
a more distant and dimmer region, and a dreary swamp of 
infidelity spread onwards and backwards throughout the past 
eternity. 

Without stopping to inquire whether — although the science 
of Geology had been revolutionized — those fears were not 
altogether exaggerated, it is enough at present to know, that, 
as Geology has not been revolutionized, there is no need to 
entertain the question. I trust I have at least succeeded in 
furnishing the reader with such references — few and simple 
when we once know where to find them — as may enable him 
to decide upon this important matter for himself. If I have 
learned anything in the course of the investigations which I 
have been endeavoring to make, it is to take nothing upon 
credence, but to wait patiently for all the evidence which can 
be brought to bear upon the subject before me ; and this, I 
believe, is the only way to make any approximation to a cor- 
rect opinion. In truth, the science of Geology is itself in that 
condition, that no fact ought to be accepted as a basis for 



PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 33 

reasoning of a solid kind, until it has run the round of investi- 
gation by the most competent authorities, and has stood the 
test of time*^ It is peculiarly subject to the cry of Lo, here ! 
and lo, there ! from false and imperfectly informed teachers ; 
and I believe the men most thoroughly to be relied on are 
those who are the slowest to theorize, the last to form a 
judgment, and who require the largest amount of evidence 
before that judgment is finally pronounced. 

In addition to the inspection of my ever kind and generous 
friend Mr. Symonds, 1 I have submitted the following pages to 
the reading of Mr. Geikie, 2 of the Geological Survey, who has 
here and there furnished a note. Of the amount and correct- 
ness of his knowledge, acquired chiefly in the field and in the 
course of his professional duties, my husband had formed the 
highest opinion. Indeed, I believe he looked upon him as the 
individual who would most probably be his successor as an 
exponent of Scottish Geology. One who walks, on an aver- 
age, twenty miles per day, and who has submitted nearly 
every rood of the soil to the accurate inspection demanded by 
the Survey, must be one whose opinion, in all that pertains to 
Scottish Geology in especial, must be well worth the having. 
I have to add an expression of most grateful thanks to Sir 

i The Rev. W. S. Symonds, author of " Old Stones," " Stones of the 
Valley," etc., and the compiler of the index to the recent edition of Sir R. 
Murchison's " Siluria." 

2 Archibald Geikie, Esq., author of " The Story of a Boulder." 



34 INTRODUCTORY RESUME: 

Roderick Murchison, for his prompt attention to sundry applu 
cations which I was constrained to make to him. His letters 
have been of the utmost importance in enabling me to perceive 
clearly the alterations which have taken place in our Scottish 
Geology, and the reasons for them. One feels instantaneously 
the benefit of contact with a master-mind. A few sentences, 
a few strokes of the pen, throw more light on the subject than 
volumes from an inferior hand. 

It remains now only to explain, that this course of Lec- 
tures, as delivered before the Philosophical Institution, con- 
sisted of eight, instead of six. Those now published are com- 
plete, according to their limits, in all that relates to the facts, 
literal or picturesque, of the subject ; and the last two of the 
series will be found in " The Testimony of the Rocks," under 
the heads of " Geology in its Bearing on the Two Theologies," 
and " The Mosaic Vision of Creation." If it had been within 
the contemplation of the author to publish the six Lectures as 
they now stand, these last two would have formed their natural 
climax or peroration. And, accordingly, I entertained some 
thought of republishing them here, in order that the reader 
might enjoy the advantage of having the whole under his eye 
at once. But, as they are not in any way necessary to the 
completion of the sense, and perhaps Geology, viewed simply 
by itself, and in the light of a popular study, is as well freed 
from extraneous matter, it was thought best, on the whole, to 



PROGRESS OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE. 85 

refer the reader who wishes to see the eight discourses in their 
original connection, to " The Testimony of the Rocks." 

I have, instead, added an Appendix of rather a novel char- 
acter. In addition to the " Cruise of the Betsey," and " Ten 
Thousand Miles over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland," 
there was left a volume of papers unpublished as a whole, 
entitled " A Tour through the Northern Counties of Scotland." 
They had, however, been largely drawn upon in various other 
works ; but, scattered throughout were passages of more or less 
value, which I had not met with elsewhere ; and some such, 
of the descriptive kind, I have culled and arranged at the end 
of the Lectures : first, because I was loth that any original 
observation from that mind which should never think again for 
the instruction of others, should be lost, and also because many 
of those passages were of a kind which might prove suggestive 
to the student, and assist him in reasoning upon those phenom- 
ena of ordinary occurrence, without close observation of which 
no one can ever arrive at a successful interpretation of nature. 
If the reader should descry aught of repetition which has 
escaped my notice, I must crave his indulgence, in considera- 
tion of the very difficult and arduous task which God, in His 
mysterious providence, has allotted me. To endeavor to do by 
these writings as my husband himself would if he were yet 
with us — to preserve the integrity of the text, and, in dealing 
with what is new, to bring to bear upon it the same unswerv- 



36 INTRODUCTORY RESUME. 

ing rectitude of purpose in valuing and accepting every iota of 
truth, whether it can be explained or not, rejecting all that is 
crude, and abhorring all that is false, — this has been my aim, 
although, alas ! too conscious throughout of the comparative 
feebleness of the powers brought to bear upon it. If, however, 
the reader is led to inquire for himself, 1 trust he will find that 
these powers, such as they are, have been used in no light or 
frivolous spirit, but with a deep, and somewhat of an adequate, 
sense of the vast importance of the subject. 

L. M. 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 



LECTURE FIRST. 



Junction of Geologic and Human History— Scottish History of Modern Date 

— The Two Periods previous to the Roman Invasion; the Stone Age and 
the Bronze Age — Geological Deposits of these Pre-historic Periods — The 
Aboriginal Woods of Scotland — Scotch Mosses consequences of the Roman 
Invasion — How formed — Deposits, Natural and Artificial, found under them 

— The Sand Dunes of Scotland — Human Remains and Works of Art found 
in them — An Old Church Disinterred in 1835 on the Coast of Cornwall — 
Controversy regarding it — Ancient Scotch Barony underlying the Sand — The 
Old and New Coast Lines in Scotland — Where chiefly to be observed — Geol- 
ogy the Science of Landscape — Scenery of the Old and New Coast Lines — 
Date of the Change of Level from the Old to the New Coast Line uncertain — 
Beyond the Historic, but within the Human Period — Evidences of the fact in 
remains of Primitive Weapons and Ancient Boats — Changes of Level not rare 
events to the Geologist — Some of these enumerated — The Boulder-Clay — Its 
prevalence in the Lowlands of Scotland — Indicated in the Scenery of the 
Country — The Scratchings on the Boulders accounted for — Produced by the 
grating of Icebergs when Scotland was submerged —Direction in which Ice- 
bergs floated, from West to East — " Crag and Tail " the Effect of it — Probable 
Cause of the Westerly Direction of the Current. 



In most of the countries of Western Europe, Scotland 
among the rest, geological history may be regarded as 
ending where human history begins. The most ancient 
portions of the one piece on to the most modern portions 
of the other. But their line of junction is, if I may so 
express myself, not an abrupt, but a shaded line ; so that, 
on the one hand, the human period passes so entirely into 
the geological, that we found our conclusions respecting 



38 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

the first human inhabitants rather on what they deemed 
geologic than on the ordinary historic data; and, on the 
other hand, some of the latter and lesser geologic changes 
have taken place in periods comparatively so recent that, 
in even our own country, we are able to catch a glimpse 
of them in the first dawn of history proper, — that written 
history in which man records the deeds of his fellows. 

In Scotland the ordinary historic materials are of no 
very ancient date. Tytler's History opens with the acces- 
sion of Alexander III., in the middle of the thirteenth 
century ; the Annals of Lord Hailes commence nearly two 
centuries earlier, with the accession of Malcolm Canmore ; 
there still exist among the muniments of Durham Cathe- 
dral charters of the "gracious Duncan," written about 
the year 1035 ; and it is held by Runic scholars that the 
Anglo-Saxon inscription on the Ruthwell Cross may be 
about two centuries earlier still. But from beyond this 
comparatively modern period in Scotland no written docu- 
ment has descended, or no native inscription decipherable 
by the antiquary. A few votive tablets and altars, let- 
tered by the legionaries of Agricola or Lollius Urbicus, 
when engaged in laying down their long lines of wall, or 
rearing their watch-towers, represent a still remoter period ; 
and a few graphic passages in the classic pages of Tacitus 
throw a partial and fitful light on the forms and characters 
of the warlike people against which the ramparts were 
cast up, and for a time defended. But beyond this epoch, 
to at least the historian of the merely literary type, or 
to the antiquary of the purely documentary one, all is 
darkness. " At one stride comes the dark." The period 
is at once reached which we find so happily described by 
Coleridge. "Antecedently to all history," says the poet, 
" and long glimmering through it as a hazy tradition, there 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 39 



presents itself to our imagination an indefinite period, 
dateless as eternity, — a state rather than a time. For 
even the sense of succession is lost in the uniformity of 
the stream." 

It is, however, more than probable that the age of Agric- 
ola holds but a midway place between the present time 
and the time in which Scotland first became a scene of 
human habitation. Two great periods had passed ere the 
period of the Roman invasion, — that earliest period now 
known to the antiquary as the " stone age" in which the 
metals were unknown, and to which the flint arrow-head 
and the greenstone battle-axe belong; and that after 
period known to the antiquary as the "bronze age" in 
which weapons of war and the chase were formed of a 
mixture of copper and tin. Bronze had, in the era of 
Agricola, been supplanted among the old Caledonians by 
iron, as stone had at an earlier era been supplanted by 
bronze ; and his legionaries were met in fight by men 
armed, much after the manner of their descendants at 
Sheriffmuir and Culloden, with broadsword and target. 
And it is known that nearly a century and a half earlier, 
when Caesar first crossed the Channel, the Britons used a 
money made of iron. The two earlier periods of bronze 
and stone had come to a close in the island ere the 
commencement of the Christian era; and our evidence 
regarding them is, as I have said, properly of a geologic 
character. We read their history in what may be termed 
the fossils of the antiquary. Man is peculiarly a tool-and- 
weapon-making animal ; and his tools and weapons repre- 
sent always the stage of civilization at which he has 
arrived. First, "stone is the material out of which he 
fashions his implements. If we except that family of man 
which preserved the aboriginal civilization, there seems 



40 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

never to have been a tribe or nation that had not at one 
time recourse to this most obvious of substances for their 
tools and weapons. Then comes an age in which stone is 
supplanted by the metals that occur in a native state, — 
i. e. in a state of ductility in the rock, — such as copper, 
silver, and gold. Of these, copper is by much the most 
abundant ; and in all countries in which it has been em- 
ployed for tools and weapons, means have been found by the 
primitive workers to harden it through an admixture of 
other metals, such as zinc and tin. Last of all, the com- 
paratively occult art of smelting iron is discovered, and 
the further art of converting it into steel; and such is 
its superiority in this form to every other metal employed 
in the fabrication of implements, that it supplants every 
other ; and the battle-axe and chisel of hardened copper 
(bronze) are as certainly superseded by it as the chisel and 
the battle-axe of stone had at an earlier period been super- 
seded by the bronze. 1 Now, it is truly wonderful how 
thoroughly, for all general purposes, this scheme of classi- 
fication, which we owe to the Danish antiquary Thomsen, 
arranges into corresponding sections and groups the an- 

1 In an interesting article on Ireland which lately appeared in the 
" Scotsman " newspaper, I find it stated that for a very considerable dis- 
tance, " between Lough Rea and Lough Derg, the river Shannon was ford- 
able at only one point, which of course formed the only medium of com- 
munication between the natives of the two banks. They seem, however," 
it is added, "to have met oftener for war than peace; and from this ford 
a whole series of ancient warlike weapons was dug out. These weapons 
are now preserved in the fine collection of antiquities in the Museum of 
the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, and are partly bronze and partly 
stone. Their position in the river bed told a curious tale, both historically 
and geologically. The weapons of bronze were all found in the upper 
stratum, and below them those of stone; showing, as antiquaries well 
know, that an age of bronze followed not an age of gold, but an age of 
stone." 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 41 

tiquities of a country, and gives to it a legible history in 
ages unrecorded by the chronicler. With the stone tools 
or weapons there are found associated in our own country, 
for instance, a certain style of sepulture, a certain type of 
cranium, a certain form of human dwellings, a certain class 
of personal ornaments, certain rude log-hollowed canoes, 
undressed standing stones, and curiously-poised cromlechs. 
The bronze tool or weapon has also its associated class of 
antiquities, — massive ornaments of gold, boats built of 
plank, and, as a modern shipwright would express himself, 
copper-fastened, cinerary urns, — for it would seem that, 
while in an earlier, as in a later age, our country-folk 
buried their dead, in this middle period they committed 
their bodies to the flames ; and, withal, evidences, in the 
occasional productions of other countries, that commerce 
had begun to break up the death-like stagnation which 
characterized the earlier period, and to send through the 
nations its circulating tides, feeble of pulse and slow, but 
instinct, notwithstanding, with the first life of civilization. 
And thus we reason on the same kind of unwritten data 
regarding the human inhabitants of our country who Irved 
during these two early stages, as that on which we reason 
regarding their contemporaries the extirpated animals, or 
their predecessors the extinct ones. The interest which 
attaches to human history thus conducted on what may 
be termed the geologic plan is singularly great. No nation 
during its stone period possesses a literature ; nor did any 
nation, of at least Western Europe, possess a literature 
during its bronze period. Of course, without letters there 
can be no history ; and even if a detailed history of such 
uncivilized nations did exist, what would be its value? 
" Milton did not scruple to declare," says Hume, " that the 

skirmishes of kites or crows as much merited a particular 

4* 



42 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

narrative as the confused transactions and battles of the 
Saxon Heptarchy." But the subject rises at once in dig- 
nity and importance when, contemplating an ancient people 
through their remains, simply as men, we trace, step by 
step, the influence and character of their beliefs, their 
progress in the arts, the effects of invasion and conquest 
on both their minds and bodies, and, in short, the broad 
and general in their history, as opposed to the minute and 
the particular. The story of a civilized people I would 
fain study in the pages of their best and most philosophic 
historians; whereas I would prefer acquainting myself 
with that of a savage one archseologically and in its re- 
mains. And I would appeal, in justification of the prefer- 
ence, to the great superiority in interest and value of the 
recently published " Pre-historic Annals of Scotland," by 
our accomplished townsman, Mr. Daniel Wilson, over all 
the diffuse narrative and tedious description of all the old 
chroniclers that ever wore out life in cloister or cell. 

What may be properly regarded as the geological de- 
posits or formations of the two pre-historic periods in 
Scotland, — the period of stone and the period of bronze, 
— are morasses, sand dunes, old river estuaries, and that 
marginal strip of flat land which intervenes between the 
ancient and the existing coast lines. The remains of man 
also occur, widely scattered all over the country, in a su- 
perficial layer, composed in some localities of the drift- 
gravels, and in others of the boulder-clay; but to this 
stratum they do not geologically belong: they lie at a 
grave's depth, and have their place in it through the prev- 
alence of that almost instinctive feeling which led the 
patriarch of old to bury his dead out of his sight. Most 
of the mistakes, however, which would antedate the exist- 
ence of our species upon the earth, and make man con- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 43 

temporary with the older extinct mammals, have resulted 
fr.om this ancient practice of inhumation, or from accidents 
which have arisen out of it. 

All our Scotch morasses seem to be of comparatively 
modern origin. There are mosses in England, or at least 
buried forests, as on the Norfolk coast, at Cromer and 
Happisburgh, that are more ancient than the drift-clays 
and gravels ; whereas, so far as is yet known, there are 
none of our Scotch mosses that do not overlie the drift 
formations ; and not a few of their number seem to have 
been formed within even the historic ages. They are the 
memorials of a period, spread over many centuries, which 
began after Scotland had arisen out of the glacial ocean, 
and presented, under a softening climate, nearly the exist- 
ing area, but bore, in its continuous covering of forest, the 
indubitable signs of a virgin country. It is remarked by 
Humboldt, that all the earlier seats of civilization are bare 
and treeless. "When, in passing from our thickly foliated 
forests of oak, we cross," he says, " the Alps or the Pyr- 
enees, and enter Italy or Spain, or when the traveller first 
directs his eye to some of the African coasts of the Medi- 
terranean, he may be easily led to adopt the erroneous 
inference that absence of trees is a characteristic of the 
warmer climates. But he forgets," it is added, "that 
Southern Europe wore a different aspect when it was first 
colonized by Pelasgian or Carthaginian settlers. He for- 
gets, too, that an earlier civilization of the human race 
sets bounds to the increase of forests ; and that nations, in 
their change-loving spirit, gradually destroy the decora- 
tions which rejoice our eye in the north, and wjiich, more 
than the records of history, attest the youthfulness of our 
civilization." Some of my audience must be old enough 
to remember the last of the great aboriginal woods of 



44 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

Scotland. It was only during the second war of the first 
French Revolution, when the northern ports of Europe 
were shut against Great Britain, that the native pine- 
woods of Rothiemurchus and the upper reaches of the 
Spey were cut down; and as late as the year 1820, I 
looked, in the upper recesses of Strathcarron, on the last 
scattered remains of one of the most celebrated of the old 
pine-forests of Ross-shire. Possibly some of the frag- 
ments of the pine-forests which skirted the western shores 
of Loch Maree may still exist ; though, when I last passed 
through it, many years ago, the axe was busy among its 
glades. It is known of some of our Scotch mosses, — the 
deposits which testify geologically to this primitive state 
of things when the country was forest-covered, — that 
they date from the times of the Roman invasion, and were 
consequences of it. The mark of the Roman axe — a 
narrow, chisel-like tool — has been detected, in many in- 
stances, on the lower tier of stumps over which the peat 
has accumulated ; and in some cases the sorely rusted axe 
itself has been found sticking in the buried tree. Among 
the tangled debris of a prostrated forest the woodman fre- 
quently mislays his tools, — a mishap to which the old 
Romans seem to have been as subject as the men of a later 
time ; and so the list of Roman utensils, coins, and arms, 
found in the mosses of the south and midland parts of 
Scotland, is in consequence a long one. "In Pousil Moss, 
near Glasgow," says Rennie, in his " Essay on Peat Moss," 
" a leathern bag containing about two hundred silver coins 
of Rome was found ; in Dundaff Mpor a number of simi- 
lar coins were found; in Annan Moss, near the Roman 
Causeway, a Roman ornament of pure gold was found ; a 
Roman camp-kettle was found eight feet deep under a 
moss on the estate of Ochtertyre; in Flanders Moss a 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 45 

similar utensil was found; a Roman jug was found in 
Locher Moss, Dumfriesshire; a pot and decanter of Ro- 
man copper was found in a moss in Kirkmichael parish, in 
the same county; and two vessels of Roman bronze in the 
Moss of Glenderhill, in Strathaven." And thus the list 
runs on. It is not difficult to conceive how, in the circum- 
stances, mosses come to be formed. The Roman soldiers 
cut down, in their march, wide avenues in the forests 
through which they passed. The felled wood was left to 
rot on the surface ; small streams were choked up in the 
levels ; pools formed in the hollows ; the soil beneath, shut 
up from the light and the air, became unfitted to produce 
its former vegetation ; but a new order of plants, the thick 
water-mosses, began to spring up ; one generation budded 
and decayed over the ruins of another; and what had 
been an overturned forest became in the course of years a 
deep morass, — an unsightly but permanent monument of 
the formidable invader. 

Some of our other Scotch mosses seem to have owed 
their origin to violent hurricanes; — their under tier of 
trunks, either turned up by the roots or broken across, lie 
all one way. What may be termed their native fossils are 
exceedingly curious. I have seen personal ornaments of 
the stone period, chiefly beads of large size, made out of 
a pink-colored carbonate of lime, which had been found in 
the bed of gravel on which one of our Galwegian mosses 
rested, and which intimated that the " stone period " had 
commenced in the island ere this moss had begun to form. 
We find the same fact borne out by the Black Moss on 
the banks of the Etive, Argyleshire, where, under an accu- 
mulation of eight feet of peat, there occur irregularly oval 
pavements of stone, overlaid often by a layer of wood- 
ashes, and surrounded by portions of hazel stakes, — the 



46 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

remains, apparently, of such primitive huts as those in 
which, according to Gibbon, the ancient Germans resided, 
and which were, we are told, "of a circular figure, built 
of rough timber, thatched with straw, and pierced at the 
top, to leave a free passage for the smoke." Similar re- 
mains, but apparently of a still more ancient type, have 
been laid open in Aberdeenshire ; and I find Mr. Wilson 
stating, in his archaeological history, that on several occa- 
sions, rude canoes, which had been hollowed out of single 
logs of wood by the agency of fire, and evidently of the 
" stone age," have been found in Lochar Moss, Dumfries- 
shire, with ornamental tores and brass bowls, not less evi- 
dently of the subsequent " bronze period." It is stated by 
Dr. Boates, in his " Natural History," that in Ireland, the 
furrows of what had been once ploughed fields have been 
found underlying bogs, — in one instance at least (in Don- 
egal), with the remains of an ancient plough, and the wat- 
tles of a hedge six feet beneath the surface. In 1833 there 
was discovered in Drumkilen bog, near the north-east 
coast of the county of Donegal, an ancient house formed 
of oak beams. Though only nine feet high, it consisted 
of two stories, each about four feet in height. One side 
of the building was entirely open, and a stone chisel was 
found on the floor, — indicating that this ancient domicile 
belonged to the stone period. Associated, too, with the 
works of man of the earlier periods, we find in our mosses 
equally suggestive remains of the extirpated, and in some 
cases of the extinct animals, such as gigantic skulls and 
horns of the JBos Primigenius or native ox, and of the Cer- 
vus Megaceros or Irish elk, with the skeletons of wolves, 
of beavers, of wild horses, and of bears. There exists what 
seems to be sufficient evidence that the two extinct ani- 
mals named the Irish elk and native ox were contemporary 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 47 

with the primitive hunters of the stone period : the cervi- 
cal vertebrae of a native ox have been found deeply scarred 
by a stone javelin, and the rib of an Irish elk perforated 
by a stone arrow-head ; and it is known that some of the 
extirpated animals, such as the wild horse, wolf, and bea- 
ver, continued to live among our forests down till a com- 
paratively recent period. 1 We find it stated by Hector 
Boece, in his " History," that there were beavers living 
among our Highland glens even in his days, as late as the 
year 1526; but there rests a shadow of doubt on the state- 
ment. It is unquestionable, however, that the Gaelic 
name of the creature, Lasleathin, or broad-tail, still sur- 
vives; and equally certain that when Baldwin, Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury, journeyed into Wales towards the 
close of the twelfth century, to incite the Welsh to join 
in the Crusades, the beaver was engaged in building its 
coffer domes and log-houses in the river Teivy, Cardigan- 
shire. The wolf and wild horse maintained their place in 
at least the northern part of the island for several centu- 
ries later. When in 1618 Taylor, the water poet, visited 
Scotland, he accompanied the " good lord of Mar " on one 
of his great hunting expeditions among the Grampians; 
and we find, from the amusing narrative of his journey, 
that for the space of twelve days he saw neither house nor 
corn-field, but "deer, wild horses, wolves, and such like 
creatures." The wolf did not finally disappear from among 
our mountains until the year 1680, when the last of the 
race was killed in Lochaber by that formidable Ewan 
Cameron of Lochiel with whom Cromwell was content to 
make peace after conquering all the rest of Scotland. 

1 Many interesting human remains have lately been disinterred from 
the Severn drift and gravels near Tewkesbury, such as cinerary urns with 
bones and ashes, and utensils for carrying water, associated with antlers 
of the red deer. — W. S. S. 



48 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

The sand dunes of the country — -accumulations of sand 
heaped over the soil by the winds, and in some cases, as in 
the neighborhood of Stromness in Orkney, and near New 
Quay on the coast of Cornwall, consolidated into a kind of 
open-grained sandstone — contain, like the mosses of the 
country, ancient human remains and works of art. There 
have been detected among the older sand dunes of Moray, 
broken or partially finished arrow-heads of flint, with splin- 
tered masses of the material out of which they had been 
fashioned, — the debris, apparently, of the workshop of 
some weapon-maker of the stone period. Among a tract 
of sand dunes on the shores of the Cromarty Frith, imme- 
diately under the Northern Sutor, in a hillock of blown 
sand, which was laid open about eighty years ago by the 
winds of a stormy winter, there was found a pile of the 
bones of the various animals of the chase, and the horns 
of deer, mixed with the shells of molluscs of the edible 
species; and, judging from the remains of an ancient hill- 
fort in the neighborhood, and from the circumstance that 
under an adjacent dune rude sepulchral urns were dis- 
interred many years after, I have concluded that the hunt- 
ers by whom they had been accumulated could not have 
flourished later than at least the age of bronze. It was 
ascertained in one of the Orkneys, about the year 1819, 
that a range of similar dunes, partially cleared by a long 
tract of high winds from the west, had overlain for untold 
ages what seemed to be the remains of an ancient Scan- 
dinavian village. In fine, very strange fossils of the human 
period has this sand deposit of subaerial formation been 
found to contain. There were disinterred on the Cornish 
coast in 1835, out of an immense wreath of sand, an old 
British church and oratory, — the church and oratory of 
Perran-sabulae, — which had been hidden from the eye of 



LECTURES COT GEOLOGY. 49 

man for nearly a thousand years. The Tractarian contro- 
versy had just begun at the time to agitate the Episcopacy 
of England ; it had become of importance to ascertain the 
exact form of building sanctioned by antiquity as most 
conducive to devotion ; and a fossil church, which had un- 
dergone no change almost since the times of the ancient 
Christianity, was too interesting a relic to escape the notice 
of the parties which the controversy divided. But though 
antagonistic volumes were written regarding it, in a style 
not quite like that in which Professor Owen and Dr. Man- 
tell have since discussed the restoration of the Belemnite, 
it was ultimately found that the little old church of St. 
Pirran the Culdee — such a budding as Robinson Crusoe 
might have erected for the ecclesiastical uses of himself 
and his man Friday — threw exceedingly little light on 
the vexed question of church architecture. The altar is in 
the east, said the Tractarians. Nay, the building itself does 
not lie east and west, replied their opponents. We grant 
you it does not, rejoined the Tractarians ; but its gable 
fronts the point where the sun rises on the saint's birthday. 
Who knows that ? exclaimed their opponents : besides, the 
sacred gable was unfurnished with a window. We deny 
that, said the Tractarians; the laborer who saw it just ere 
it fell says there was a large hole in it. And thus the con- 
troversy ran on, undoubtedly amusing, and, I daresay, very 
instructive. The north of Scotland has its ancient fossil 
barony underlying a wilderness of sand ; ploughed fields 
and fences, with the walls of turf-cottages, and the remains 
of a manor-house, all irrecoverably submerged; — and we 
find the fact recorded in a Scotch act of the times of Wil- 
liam III. Curious, as being perhaps the only act of Par- 
liament in existence to which the geologist could refer for 
the history of a deposit, I must take the liberty of submit* 

5 



50 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

ting to you a small portion of one of its long sentences. 
"Our Sovereign Lord," says the preamble, "considering 
that many lands, meadows, and pasturages, lying on the 
sea-coasts, have been ruined and overspread in many parts 
of this kingdom by sand driven from sand-hills, the which 
has been mainly occasioned by the pulling up of the roots 
of bent, juniper, and broom bushes, which did loose and 
break the surface and scroof of the sand-hills ; and partic- 
ularly, considering that the barony of Cawbin, and house 
and yeards thereof, lying within the sheriffdom of Elgin, is 
quite ruined and overspread with sand, the which was oc- 
casioned by the foresaid bad practice of pulling the bent 
and juniper, — does hereby strictly prohibit," etc., etc., etc. 
I have wandered for hours amid the sand-wastes of this 
ruined barony, and seen only a few stunted bushes of 
broom, and a few scattered tufts of withered bent, occupy- 
ing, amid utter barrenness, the place of what, in the middle 
of the seventeenth century, had been the richest fields of 
the rich province of Moray ; and, where the winds had 
hollowed out the sand, I have detected, uncovered for a 
few yards'-breadth, portions of the buried furrows, sorely 
dried into the consistence of sun-burned brick, but largely 
charged with the seeds of the common corn-field weeds of 
the country, that, as ascertained by experiment by the late 
Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, still retain their vitality. It is 
said that an antique dove-cot in front of the huge sand- 
wreath which enveloped the manor-house, continued to 
present the top of its peaked roof over the sand, as a foun- 
dered vessel sometimes exhibits its vane over the waves, 
until the year 1760. The traditions of the district testify 
that, for many years after the orchard had been enveloped, 
the topmost branches of the fruit-trees, barely seen over 
the surface, continued each spring languidly to throw out 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 51 

bud and blossom ; and it is a curious circumstance, that in 
the neighboring churchyard of Dike there is a sepulchral 
monument of the Culbin family, which, though it does not 
date beyond the reign of James VI., was erected by a 
lord and lady of the last barony, at a time when they 
seem to have had no suspicion of the utter ruin which was 
coming on their house. The quaint inscription runs as 
follows : 

VALER : KINNAIRD : ELIZABETH : LNNIS : 1613 : 

THE : BVILDARS : OP : THIS : BED : OP : STAKE : 

AR : LAIRD : AND : LADIE : OP : COVBINE : 

QVHILK : TVA : AND : THARS : QVHANE : BRAITHE IS : GAKE : 

PLEIS : GOD : VIL : SLEIP : THIS : BED : VITHIN : 

I refer to these facts, though they belong certainly to no 
very remote age in the past history of our country, chiefly 
to show that in what may be termed the geological forma- 
tions of the human period very curious fossils may be 
already deposited, awaiting the researches of the future. 
As we now find, in raising blocks of stone from the quarry, 
water-rippled surfaces lying beneath, fretted by the tracks 
of ancient birds and reptiles, there is a time coming when, 
under thick beds of stone, there may be detected fields and 
orchards, cottages, manor-houses, and churches, — the me- 
morials of nations that have perished, and of a condition 
of things and a stage of society that have forever passed 
away. 

Sand dunes and morasses are phenomena of a strictly local 
character. The last great geological change, general in its 
extent and effects, of which Scotland was the subject, was 
a change in its level, in relation to that of the ocean, of 
from fifteen to thirty feet. At some unascertained period, 
regarded as recent by the geologist, — for man seems to 
have been an actor on the scene at the time, — but remote 



52 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

by the historian, — for its date is anterior to that of his 
oldest authorities in this country, — the land rose, appar- 
ently during several interrupted paroxysms of upheaval, so 
that there was a fringe of comparatively level sea-bottom 
laid dry, and added to the country's area, considerably 
broader than that which we now see exposed by the ebb of 
every stream tide. And what I must deem indubitable 
marks of this change of level can be traced all around Scot- 
land and its islands. The country, save in a few interrupted 
tracts of precipitous coast, where the depth of the water, 
like that beside a steep mole whose base never dries at ebb, 
precluded any accession to the land, presents around its 
margin a double coast line, — the line at present washed 
by the waves, and a line now covered with grass, or waving 
with shrubs, or skirted by walls of precipice perforated with 
caves, against which the surf broke for the last time more 
than two thousand years ago. These raised beaches form 
a peculiar feature in our Scottish scenery, which you must 
have often remarked. In passing along the public road be- 
tween Portobello and Leith, the traveller sees upon the 
left hand a continuous grassy bank, with a line of willows 
atop, which he may mark in some places advancing in low 
promontories, in others receding into shallow bays, and 
which is separated from the present eoast line, which in 
general flatness it greatly resembles, by a strip of rich 
meadow land, varying from one to three hundred yards in 
breadth. The continuous grassy bank is the old coast line ; 
and the gently sloping margin of green meadow is the strip 
of flat sea-beach along which the tides used to rise and fall 
twice every twenty-four hours, ere the retreat of the sea 
within its present bounds. Should it be low ebb at the 
time, one may pass from the ancient to the recent sea- 
beach ; the one waving with grass, the other brown with 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 53 

algaa ; the one consisting, under its covering of vegetable 
mould, of stratified gravels and sand, blent with the de- 
cayed shells of mollusca that died more than twenty cen- 
turies since ; the other formed of exactly the same sort of 
lines of stratified sand and gravel, and strewed over by 
shells that were thrown ashore by the last tide, and that 
lived only a few weeks ago. And, rising over the lower, 
as over the upper flat, we see a continuous escarpment, 
which marks where, in the present age, during the height 
of stream tides, the sea and the land meet ; just as the up- 
per willow-crested escarpment indicates where they met of 
old. The two escarpments and the two gently sloping 
planes at their base are repetitions of the same phenomena, 
save that the upper escarpment and upper plane are some- 
what softer in their outline than the lower, — an effect of 
the wear of the elements, and of the accumulation of the 
vegetable mould. There is as thorough an identity between 
them as between -two contiguous steps of a stair, covered, 
the one by a patch of brown, and the other by a patch of 
green, in the pattern of the' stair-carpet. There are other 
parts of our Scottish shores in which the old coast line is 
of a much bolder character than anywhere in this neigh- 
borhood, and the plane at its base of greater breadth. On 
the Forfarshire coast, the Dundee and Arbroath Railway 
runs along the level margin, once a sea-bottom, which at 
one point, opposite the parish church of Barrie, is at length 
two miles in breadth, and the old coast line rises from thirty 
to fifty feet over it. It is strongly marked on the southern 
side of the Dornoch Frith, immediately below and for sev- 
eral miles to the east of the town of Tain, where it attains 
a breadth of from one to two miles, and where the old sea- 
margin, rising over the cottage-mottled plain below in a 
series of jutting headlands, with green bosky bays between, 



54 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

strikes even the least j>ractised eye as possessed of all the 
characteristic peculiarities of a true coast line. It is scarce 
less marked in the neighborhood of Cromarty, and on the 
opposite shore of the Cromarty Frith, in the parish of Nigg. 
It runs along by much the greater portion of the eastern 
coast of Sutherland ; and forms at the head of Loch Fleet, 
in the neighborhood of Dornoch, a long withdrawing frith, 
bounded by picturesque shores, and covered by a short, 
green sward, level as the sea in a calm, on which groups 
of willow and alder trees take the place of busy fleets, and 
the hare and the partridge that of the coot and the por- 
poise. Along the upper recesses of almost all our flatter 
friths, such as the friths of Beauly, of Dingwall, and of the 
Tay, and of the Clyde, it exists as fertile tracts of carse- 
land ; the rich links of the Forth, rendered classical by the 
muse of Macneil, belong to it ; it furnishes, in various other 
localities more exposed to the open sea, ranges of sandy 
links of a less valuable character, such as the range in our 
own neighborhood occupied by the race-course of Inveresk; 
and not a few of the seaports and watering places of the 
country, such as the greater part of Leith, Portobello, 
Musselburgh, Kirkaldy, Dundee, Dingwall, Invergordon, 
Cromarty, Wick, Thurso, Kirkwall, Oban, and Greenock, 
have been built upon it. 

The old coast line, with the flat marginal selvage at its 
base, form, as I have said, well-marked features in the 
scenery of the island. Geology may be properly regarded 
as the science of landscape : it is to the landscape painte^ 
what anatomy is to the historic one or to the sculptor. T 
the singularly rich and variously compounded prospects 
of our country there is scarce a single trait that cannot 
be resolved into some geological peculiarity in the coun- 
try's framework, or which does not bear witness otherwise 






LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. . 55 

and more directly than from any mere suggestion of the 
associative faculty, to some striking event in its physical 
history. Its landscapes are tablets roughened, like the 
tablets of Xineveh, with the records of the past ; and their 
various features, whether of hill or valley, terrace or escarp- 
ment, form the bold and graceful characters in which the 
narrative is inscribed. As our Scottish geologists have 
given less attention to this special department of their 
science than to perhaps any other, — less, I am disposed to 
think, than, from its intrinsic interest and its bearing on 
art, is fairly owing to it, — I shall take the liberty — cast- 
ing myself on the forbearance of such of my audience as 
are least artistic in their tastes — of occasionally touching 
upon it in my course. 

I need scarce refer to the scenery of our mosses, — these 
sombre, lake-like tracts, divested, however, of the cheerful 
gleam of the water, — that so often fatigue the eye of the 
traveller among our mountains, but which at that season 
when the white cottony carnach mottles their dark sur- 
faces, reminding one of tears on a hatchment, — when the 
hills around, purple with the richly- blossoming heath, are 
chequered with the light and shade of a cloud-dappled 
sky, — and when, in the rough foreground, the gray upright 
stone of other days waves its beard of long gray lichen to 
the breeze, — are not unworthy, in their impressive loneli- 
ness, of employing, as they have oftener than once done, 
the magic pencil of a Macculloch. I need as little refer to 
the scenery of those sand dunes which gleam so brightly 
amid some of our northern landscapes, and which, not 
only in color, but also in form, contrast so stronglywith 
our morasses. The dark flat morass is suggestive always 
of sluggish and stagnant repose ; whereas, among our sand 
from the minuter ripple-markings of the general 



[unes, 



5Q LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

surface to the wave-like form of the hills sloped in the 
direction of the prevailing winds, and curved, like snow- 
wreaths, to the opposite point of the compass, almost' every 
outline is equally suggestive of motion. I could, however, 
fain borrow the pencil of our countryman Hill, as he em- 
ploys it in his exquisite cabinet-pictures, to portray the 
story of the last Barony : rolling hills of sand all around, 
the red light of a stormy summer evening deepening into 
dun and lurid brown, through an eddying column of suf- 
focating dust snatched up by a whirlwind ; the antique 
garden-dial dimly shadowing forth the hour of sunset for 
the last time, amid half-submerged shrubs and trees ; and, 
full in the centre of the picture, a forlorn fortalice of the 
olden time, with the encroaching wreath rising to its lower 
battlements, like some wrecked vessel on a wild lee-shore, 
with the angry surf raging high over her deck, and kissing 
with its flame-like tips the distant yards. 

The scenery of the old coast line possesses well-nigh all 
the variety of that of the existing coast ; but it substitutes 
field and meadow for the blue sea, and woods and human 
dwellings for busy mast-crowded harbors, and fleets riding 
at anchor. It is pleasing, however, to see headland jutting 
out beyond headland into some rich plain, traversed by 
trim hedge-rows and green lanes ; or some picturesque 
cottage, overshadowed by its gnarled elm, rising in some 
bosky hollow at the foot of the swelling bank or weather- 
stained precipice, beneath which the restless surf once 
broke against the beach. There are well-marked speci- 
mens of this scenery of the ancient coast line in our imme- 
diate neighborhood. Musselburgh, with its homely Saxon 
name, lies in the middle of what was once a flat sandy bay, 
now laid out into fields, gardens, and a race-course ; and 
the old coast escarpment, luxuriant with hanging woods, 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 57 

and gay with villas, and which may possibly have been its 
first Celtic designation, Inveresk, ere the last upheaval of 
the land, half closes around it. The church and burying- 
ground occupy the top of a long ridge, that had once been 
a river-bar, heaped up apparently by the action of the 
waves on the one side, and by that of the stream on the 
other. But, as shown by the remains of Roman baths and 
a Roman rampart, which once occupied its summit, it must 
have borne its present character from at least the times of 
Lollius Urbicus, — perhaps for several centuries earlier. 
The neighboring port of Portobello, as seen from the east, 
just as it comes full in sight on the Musselburgh road, 
seems set so completely in a framework of the ancient 
escarpment, that it derives from it its natural features. 
But it is where, along our boulder shores, lines of steep 
precipices have been elevated over the sea, so that the 
waves no longer reach their bases, that the old coast sce- 
nery is at once most striking and peculiar. Tall picturesque 
stacks, which had once stood up amid the surf, brown and 
shaggy with the serrated fucus and the broad-fronded lam- 
inara, now rise out of thickets of fern or sloethorn, and 
wave green with glassy ivy and the pendant honeysuckle. 
Deep caverns, too, in which the billows had toiled for ages, 
but now silent, save when the drop tinkles from above into 
some cool cistern half hidden in the gloom of the interior, 
open along the wall of cliffs ; and over projecting buttresses 
of rock, perforated often at their bases as if by Gothic 
archways, and thickly mantled over by liverworts, green 
and gray, the birch hangs tremulous from above, or the 
hazel shoots out its boughs of brighter green, or the moun- 
tain-ash hangs its scarlet berries. One of the most pleasing 
landscapes of one of the most accomplished of female 
artists — Miss Stoddart — has as its subject an ancient 



58 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

escarpment of this bold character, which occurs in Arran. 
A mossy, fern-tufted meadow, skirted by the sea, roughened 
by what had once been half-tide skerries, and enlivened 
by a Highland cottage, stretches out into the foreground 
from an irregular wall of rock, overhung by graceful foli- 
age, hollowed into deep recesses, adown which the waters 
tinkle, and with some of its bolder projections perforated 
at the base like flying buttresses of the decorated Gothic ; 
and such is the truth of the representation, that we at 
once determine that the artist had chosen as her subject 
one of the more precipitous reaches of the old coast line, 
and that its wall of rock must have derived much of the 
peculiarity of trait so happily caught, from the action of 
the waves. Again, in direct contrast with this striking 
type of old coast escarpment, though in its own way 
not less striking, Mr. Hill's fine picture, " The Sands at 
Sunrise," lately engraved by the Art Union, exhibits as its 
background one of those long, flat, sandy spits, products 
of the last upheaval, which, stretching far into the sea, 
bear amid the light of day an air of even deeper loneliness 
than our woods and fields when embrowned by the gather- 
ing night. When the insulated stacks of an old coast line 
are at once tall and attenuated, and of a white or pale- 
colored rock, the effect, especially when viewed by moon- 
light, is singularly striking. The valley of the Seine, as 
described by Sir Charles Lyell, — now a valley, but once 
a broad frith, — is flanked on each side, in its lower reaches, 
by tall stacks of white chalk, of apparently the same age 
as those of the ancient coast line of our own country; 
and, seen ranged along their green hill-sides, in the imper- 
fect light of evening, or by the rising moon, they seem the 
sheeted spectres of some extinct tribe of giants. 

The date of that change of level which gave to Scot- 






LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 59 

land this flat fringe of margin-land, with its picturesque es- 
carpment of ancient coast, we cannot positively fix. We 
find reason to conclude that it took place previous to the age 
of the Roman invasion. It has been shown, from evidence 
of a semi-geologic, semi-archaeologic character, by one of 
our highest authorities on the subject, Mr. Smith of Jor- 
danhill, that the land must have stood at a not lower level 
than now, when the Roman wall which connects the friths 
of Forth and Clyde was completed. For, had it been 
otherwise, some of the terminal works which remain would 
have been, what they obviously were not, under the sea 
line at the time. In the sister kingdom, too, which has 
also its old coast line, St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall, 
which was connected with the mainland at low water by 
a strip of beach in the times of Julius Caesar, — a fact 
recorded by Diodorus Siculus, — is similarly connected 
with the mainland at low water still. But though the 
upheaval of the old coast line is removed thus beyond the 
historic period, it seems to have fallen, as I have said, 
within the human one : man seems to have been an inhab- 
itant of the island when its general level was from twenty 
to forty feet lower than now, and the waves broke at full 
tide against the old coast line. " The skeleton of a Balse- 
noptera," says Professor Owen, "seventy-two feet in length, 
was found," about thirty years ago, " imbedded in the clay 
on the banks of the Forth, more than twenty feet above 
the reach of the highest tide." And again, " Several bones 
of a whale," 1 he continues, "were also discovered at Dun- 
more rock, Stirlingshire, in brick-earth, nearly forty feet 
above the present sea-level." These whales must have 
been stranded when the old coast line was washed by the 

i Bones of the whale have been found in the clay of the Avon and 
Severn drifts, in a similar position. — W. S. S. 



60 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

waves, and the marginal strip existed as an oozy sea-bot* 
torn ; and yet in both cases there were found, among the 
bones, primitive weapons made of the pointed branches 
of deer's horns, hollowed at their broad ends by artificial 
perforations ; and in one of these perforations the decayed 
fragments of a wooden shaft still remained. The pointed 
and perforated j^ieces of horn were evidently rude lance- 
heads, that in all probability had been employed against 
the stranded cetacea by the savage natives. Further, where 
the city of Glasgow now stands, three ancient boats — 
one of which may be seen in the Museum of our Scottish 
Antiquaries in Edinburgh, and another in the Andersonian 
Museum — have been dug up since the year 1781 ; the last 
only four years ago. One of the number was found a full 
quarter of a mile from the Clyde, and about twenty-six 
feet above its level at high water. It reposed, too, not on 
a laminated silt, such as the river now deposits, but on a 
pure sea sand. "It therefore appears," says Mr. Robert 
Chambers, in his singularly ingenious work on "Raised 
Beaches," "that we have scarcely an alternative to the 
supposition that when these vessels foundered, and were 
deposited where in modern times they have been found, the 
Frith of Clyde was a sea several miles wide at Glasgow, 
covering the site of the lower districts of the city, and 
receiving the waters of the river not lower than Bothwell 
Bridge." I may add, that the Glasgow boat in the Anti- 
quarian Museum is such a rude canoe, hollowed out of a 
single trunk, as may be seen in use among such of the 
Polynesian islands as lie most out of the reach of civiliza- 
tion, or in the Indian Archipelago, among the rude Alforian 
races ; and that in another of these boats — the first dis- 
covered — there was found a beautifully polished hatchet 
of dark greenstone, — an unequivocal indication that they 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 61 

belonged to the "stone period." There are curious ety- 
mologies traceable among the older Celtic names of places 
in the country, which I have sometimes heard adduced in 
evidence that it was inhabited, ere the last upheaval of the 
land, by the ancient Gaelic-speaking race. Eminences that 
rise in the flat marginal strip, and which, though islands 
once, could not have been such since the final recession of 
the sea, continue to bear, as in the neighborhood of Stir- 
ling, the Gaelic prefix for an island. But as the old Celts 
seem to have been remarkable as a people for their nice 
perception of resemblances, the insular form of these emi- 
nences may be perhaps regarded as suggestive enough to 
account for their names. One of these etymologies, how- 
ever, which could scarce have been founded on any mere 
resemblance, seems worthy of special notice. Loch Ewe, 
in Ross-shire, one of our salt sea lochs, receives the waters 
of Loch Maree, — a noble fresh-water lake, about eighteen 
miles in length, so little raised above the sea-level, that 
ere the last upheaval of the land it must have formed 
merely the upper reaches of Loch Ewe. The name Loch 
Maree — Mary's Loch — is evidently mediaeval. And, curi- 
ously enough, about a mile beyond its upper end, just 
where Loch Ewe would have terminated ere the land 
last arose, an ancient farm has borne from time immemo- 
rial the name of Kinlochewe, — the head of Loch Ewe. 
Dispose, however, of the etymologies as we may, there are 
facts enough on record which render it more than probable 
that, though the general change of level to which we owe 
the old coast line in Scotland does not lie within the his- 
toric ages, it is comprised within the human period. But 
we cannot, as has been shown, fix upon a date for the 
event. 

Were the case otherwise, — could we fix with any cer- 

6 



62 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

tainty the time when this change of level took place, and 
the platform of the lower coast line was gained from the 
sea, — there might be an approximation made to the ante- 
rior space of time during which the line of high water had 
been the willow-crowned escarpment beyond Portobello 
and the green bank near Rutherglen, and the sea rose fir 
beyond its present limits in our friths and bays. There 
are portions of the coast that at this early period presented 
to the waves lines of precipices that are now fringed at 
their bases by strips of verdure, and removed far beyond 
their reach. There are other portions of coast in the 
immediate neighborhood of these, where similar lines of 
precipices, identical in their powers of resistance, were 
brought by the same movement within that very influence 
of the waves beyond which the others had been raised. 
And each line bears, in the caves with which it is fretted, 
— caves hollowed by the attrition of the surf in the direc- 
tion of faults, or where masses of yielding texture had 
been included in the solid rock, — indices to mark, propor- 
tionally at least, the respective periods during which they 
were exposed to the excavating agent. Thus, the aver- 
age depth of the ancient caves in an exposed line of coast, 
as ascertained by dividing the aggregate sum of their 
depths by their number, and the average depth, ascertained 
by the same process, of the recent caves, equally exposed 
on the same c'oast, and hollowed in the same variety of 
rock, could scarce fail to represent their respective periods 
of exposure, had we but a given number of years, histor- 
ically determined, to set off against the average measure- 
ment of the recent excavations. Even wanting that, how- 
ever, it is something to know, that though the sea has 
stood at the existing sea-margin since the days of Agric- 
ola, and at least a few centuries more, it stood for a con- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 63 

siderably longer period at the old coast line. The rock 
of which those remarkable promontories, the Sutors of 
Cromarty, are composed, is a granite gneiss, much trav- 
ersed by faults, and inclosing occasional masses of a soft 
chloritic schist, that yields to the waves, while the sur- 
rounding gneiss — hard enough to strike fire with steel — 
remains little affected by the attrition of centuries. These 
promontories have, in consequence, their numerous caves 
ranged in a double row, — the lower row that of the exist- 
ing coast, the upper that of the old one ; and I have 
examined both rows with some little degree of care. The 
deepest of the recent caves measures, from the opening to 
its inner extremity, where the rock closes, exactly a hun- 
dred feet ; the deepest of the ancient ones, now so com- 
pletely raised above the surf, that in the highest tides, and 
urged upwards by the severest storms, the waves never 
reach its mouth, measures exactly a hundred and fifty feet. 
And these depths, though much beyond the respective 
average depths of their several rows, bear, so far as I could 
ascertain the point, the proportions to each other that 
these averages bear. The caves of the existing coast line 
are as two in depth, and those of the old coast line as three. 
If the excavation of the recent caves be the work of two 
thousand years, the excavation of .the ancient caves must 
have been the work of three thousand ; or, as two thou- 
sand does not bring us much beyond the Roman period, 
let us assume as the period of the existing coast line and 
its caves, two thousand two hundred years, and as the 
proportional period of the old coast line, three thousand 
three hundred more. Both sums united brin^ us back 
five thousand five hundred years. How much more an- 
cient either coast line may be, we of course cannot deter- 
mine : we only know that, on the lowest possible assump- 



64 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

tion, we reach a period represented by their united ages 
only less extended by six years than that which the Sa- 
maritan chronology assumes as the period during which 
man has existed upon earth, and only three hundred and 
fifty-five years less than that assumed by the Masoretic 
chronology. The chronology of the Septuagint, which 
many have begun to deem the most adequate of the three, 
adds about five hundred and eighty-six years to the sum 
of the latter. 

Permit me, in closing this part of my subject, to show 
you that changes of level such as that to which we owe 
our old coast line in Scotland, and the marginal strip of 
dry land which we have laid out into so many pleasant 
gardens and fields, and on which we have built so many 
of our seaport towns, are by no means very rare events 
to the geologist. He enumerates at least five localities in 
the Old World, — Scandinavia, part of the west coast of 
Italy, the coasts of Cutch and of Arracan, and part of the 
kingdom of Luzan, in which the level is slowly changing 
at the present time ; and in the New World there are vast 
districts in which the land suddenly changed its level for 
a higher one during the present century. " On the 19th 
of November 1822," says Sir Charles Lyell, "the coast of 
Chili was visited by a most disastrous earthquake. When 
the district around Valparaiso was examined on the morn- 
ing after the shock, it was found that the whole line of 
coast for the distance of above one hundred miles was 
raised above its former level. At Valparaiso the elevation 
was three feet, and at Quinteno about four feet. Part of 
the bed of the sea remained bare and dry at high water, 
with beds of oyster, mussel, and other shells, adhering to 
the rocks on which they grew, — the fish being all dead, 
and exhaling offensive effluvia." Again, on the east side 



LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 65 

of the Bay of Bengal, upon the coast of Arracan, which is 
at present in the course of rising, there are islands which 
present on their shores exactly such an appearance as our 
own country would have presented some sixty or a hun- 
dred years after the elevation of the old coast line. The 
island of Reguain, one of these, was carefully surveyed in 
the year 1841 by the officers of her Majesty's brig Chil- 
ders : and it has been carefully mapped in the admirable 
Physical Atlas of the Messrs. Johnston of Edinburgh. 
We find it, as shown in the map, resembling three islands ; 
the one placed within the other, as, to employ a homely 
illustration, the druggist, to save room, places his empty 
pill-boxes the one within the other. First, in the centre, 
there is the ancient island, with a well-defined coast line, 
some six or eight feet high, running all around it. At the 
base of this line there is a level sea of rich paddy fields, — 
for what may be termed the second island has been all 
brought into cultivation ; and it has also its coast line, 
which descends some six or eight feet more, to the level 
of a third island, which was elevated over the sea not 
more than eighty years ago, and which is still unculti- 
vated ; and the third island is surrounded by the existing 
coast line. Thus the centre island of Reguain consists of 
three great steps or platforms, each of which marks a par- 
oxysm of elevation ; and, with the upheaval of the coast 
of Chili, and a numerous class of events of a similar char- 
acter, it enables us to conceive of the last great geological 
change of which our country was the subject. We imag- 
ine a forest-covered land, marked by the bold, command- 
ing features by which we recognize our country, but in- 
habited by barbarous, half-naked tribes, that dwell in rude 
circular wigwams, formed of the branches of trees, — that 
employ in war or the chase weapons of flint or jasper, 

6* 



6Q LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

— and that navigate their rivers or estuaries in canoes 
hollowed by fire out of single logs of wood. There has 
been an earthquake during the night ; and when morning 
rises, the beach shows its broad, darkened strip of apparent 
ebb, though the tide is at full at the time ; and when 
the waters retire, they leave vast uncovered tracts never 
seen before, comparatively barren in sea-weed, but rich in 
stony nulliparite encrustations, minute coralines, and fleshy 
sponges. Ages elapse, and civilization grows. The added 
belt of level land is occupied to its utmost extent by man : 
he lays it out into gardens and fields, and builds himself a 
dwelling upon it : but no sooner has he rendered it of 
some value, than the sea commences with him a course 
of tedious litigation for the recovery of its property ; and 
bit by bit has it been wresting it out of his hands. Almost 
all those tracts on our coasts which have been suffering 
during the last few centuries from the encroachment of 
the waves, and which have to be protected against their 
fury wherever land is valuable, as in this neighborhood, by 
lines of bulwarks, belong to the flat marginal strip won 
from them by the last change of level. 

Our next great incident in the geologic history of Scot- 
land dates, it would seem, beyond the human period. In 
passing along the beach between Musselburgh and Porto- 
bello, or again between Portobello and Leith, or yet again 
between Leith and NeAvhaven, one sees an exceedingly 
stiff, dark-colored clay, charged with rounded pebbles and 
boulders, and which, where washed by the waves, presents 
a frontage nearly as steep as that of the rock itself. The 
deposit by which it is represented is known technically to 
the agriculturist as Till, and to the geologist as the Boul- 
der-Clay. Though not continuous, it is of very general 
occurrence, in the Lowlands of Scotland, and presents, 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 67 

though it varies in color and composition, according to the 
nature of the rocks which it overlies, certain unique ap- 
pearances, which seem to connect its origin in the several 
localities with one set of causes, and which no other 
deposit presents. Like the raised beaches, it has contrib- 
uted its distinctive quota to the variously featured scenery 
of our country. The Scottish word scaur, in the restricted 
significancy attached to it in many parts of the kingdom, 
means simply a precipice of clay ; and it is almost invari- 
ably the boulder-clay that forms scaurs in Scotland; for 
it is one of the peculiarities of the deposit, that it stands 
up well-nigh as steeply over the sides of rivers, or on 
encroaching sea-beaches, or on abrupt hill-sides, as rock 
itself; and these clay precipices bear almost invariably a 
peculiar set of characters of their own. In some cases 
they spring up as square and mural, seen in front, as cliffs 
of the chalk, but seen in profile, we find their outlines 
described by parabolic curves. In other cases we see the 
vegetable mould rendered coherent by the roots of shrubs 
and grasses projecting over them atop, like the cornice of 
some edifice over its frieze. In yet other cases, though 
abrupt as precipices of solid rock, we find them seamed by 
the weather into numerous divergent channels, with py- 
ramidal peaks between ; and, thus combining the perpen- 
dicularity of true cliffs with the rain-scooped furrows of a 
yielding soil, they present eccentricities of aspect which 
strike, by their grotesqueness, eyes little accustomed to 
detect the picturesque in landscape. Such are some of 
the features of the scaurs of our country, — a well-marked 
class of precipices for which the English language has no 
name. It is, however, in continuous grass-covered escarp- 
ments, which in some parts form the old coast line, and 
rise in others along the sides of rivers, that we detect at 



68 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

once the most marked and most graceful scenic peculiarity 
of the boulder-clay. The steep slopes, furrowed by enor- 
mous flutings, like those of the antique Doric, appear as 
if laid out into such burial-mounds as those with which a 
sexton frets the surface of a country churchyard, but with 
this difference, that they seem the burial-mounds of giants 
tall and bulky as those that of old warred against the 
gods. On a grass-covered escarpment of the boulder-clay 
in the neighborhood of Cromarty these mounds are strik- 
ing enough to have caught the eye of the children of the 
place, and are known among them as the giants' graves. 
They lie against the green bank, each from forty to sixty 
yards in length, and from six to ten yards in height, with 
their feet to the shore, and their heads on the top of the 
escarpment ; and when the evening sun falls low, and the 
shadows lengthen, they form, from their alternate bars of 
light and shade, that remind one of the ebon and ivory 
buttress of the poet, a singularly pleasing feature in the 
landscape. I have sometimes wished I could fix their fea- 
tures in a calotype, for the benefit of my friends the land- 
scape painters. This vignette, I would fain say, represents 
the boulder-clay after its precipitous banks — worn down, 
by the frosts and rains of centuries, into parallel runnels, 
that gradually widened into these hollow grooves — had 
sunk into the angle of inclination at which the disintegrat- 
ing agents ceased to operate, and the green sward covered 
all up. You must be studying these peculiarities of aspect 
more than ever you studied them before. There is a time 
coming when the connoisseur will as rigidly demand the 
specific character of the various geologic deposits in your 
rocks and scaurs, as he now demands specific character in 
your shrubs and trees. 

I have said that the boulder-clay exhibits certain unique 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 69 

appearances, which connect its origin in the several locali- 
ties with one set of causes, and which no other deposit 
presents. On examining the boulders w^hich it encloses, 
we find them strongly scarred and scratched. In most 
instances, too, the rock on which the clay rests, — if it be 
a trap, or a limestone, or a finely-grained sandstone, or, in 
short, any rock on which a tool could act, and of a texture 
fitted to retain the mark of the tool, — we find similarly 
scarred, grooved, and scratched. In this part of the 
country, the boulder-clay contains scarce any fossils, save 
fragments of the older organisms derived from the rocks 
beneath ; but in both the north and south of Scotland -— 
in Caithness, for instance, and in Wigtonshire — it con- 
tains numerous shells, which, both in their species and 
their state of keeping, throw light on the origin of the 
formation. But of that more anon. Let me first remark, 
that the materials of the level marginal strip of ancient 
sea-beach beneath the old coast line seem, like the mate- 
rials of the existing sea-beach, to have been arranged 
wholly by the agency of water. But in the boulder-clay 
we find a class of appearances which mere water could 
not have produced. Not only are the larger pebbles and 
boulders of the deposit scratched and grooved, but also its 
smaller stones, of from a few pounds to but a few ounces, 
or even less than an ounce, in weight ; and this, too, in a 
peculiar style and direction. When the stones are de- 
cidedly of an oblong or spindle shape, the scratchings 
occur, in at least four cases out of every five, in the line 
of their lpnger axis. Now, the agent which produced such 
effects could not have been simply water, whether im- 
pelled by currents or in waves. The blacksmith, let him 
use what strength of arm he may, cannot bring his file to 
bear upon a minute pin until he has first locked it fast in 



70 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

his vice ; and then, though not before, his tool bears upon 
it, and scratches it as deeply as if it were a beam of iron 
of a ton weight. The smaller stones must have been 
fastened before they could have been scratched. Even, 
however, if the force of water could have scratched and 
furrowed them, it would not have scratched and furrowed 
them longitudinally, but across. Stones, when carried 
adown a stream by the torrent, or propelled upwards along 
a beach by the waves, present always their broader and 
longer surfaces ; and the broader and longer these surfaces 
are, the further are the stones propelled. They are not 
launched forwards, as a sailor would say, end on, but tum- 
bled forwards broadside. They come rolling down a river 
in flood, or upwards on the shore in a time of tempest, as 
a hogshead rolls down a declivity. In the boulder-clay, 
on the contrary, most of the pebbles that bear the mark 
of their transport at all were not rolled, but slidden for- 
ward in the line of their longer axis. They were launched, 
as ships are launched, in the line of least resistance, or as 
an arrow or javelin is sent on its course through the air. 
Water could not have been the agent here, nor yet an 
eruption of mud, propelled along the surface by some 
wave of translation, produced by the sudden upheaval of 
the bottom of the sea, or by some great wave raised by an 
earthquake. 

But if water or an eruption of mud could not have pro- 
duced such effects as the longitudinal scratching, let us ask 
what could have produced them? There are various pro- 
cesses going on around us, by which the scratchings on the 
solid rocks beneath are occasionally simulated with a less 
or greater degree of exactness. In some of our shallow 
Highland fields, for instance, I have seen the rock beneath, 
or the stones buried at the depth of but a few inches from 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 71 

the surface, scarred by the plough with ruts not very 
unlike the larger ones on the stones and rocks of the 
boulder-clay; but in these plough-scarred surfaces the 
polish is wanting. Again, in some of our steeper lanes, if 
a fine-grained trap has been used in the pavement, we find 
that it soon polishes and wears down under the iron-armed 
feet of the passengers, and becomes scratched in the line 
of their tread, in a style not very distinguishable, save 
for the absence of the deeper furrows, from that of the 
scratched and polished rock-pavements of the boulder- 
clay. But I know of only one process by which, on a 
small scale, all the phenomena of the boulder-clay could 
be produced, more especially, however, the phenomena of 
its oblong pebbles scratched in the lines of their longer 
axis ; and my recollection of that one dates a good many 
years back. When, more than a quarter of a century ago, 
the herring fishery began to be prosecuted with vigor in 
the north of Scotland, many of the Highland woods of 
natural birch and alder were cut down for the manufacture 
of barrels, and floated in rafts along the rivers to the sea. 
And my opportunities of observing these rafts, as they 
shot along the more rapid reaches of our mountain streams, 
or swept over their shallower ledges, grazing the bottom 
as they passed, naturally led me to inquire into their oper- 
ations upon the beds of the streams adown which they 
were floated. Let us advert to some of these. When a 
large raft of wood, floated down a rapid river, grates - 
heavily over some shallow bank of gravel and pebbles 
resting on the rock beneath, it communicates motion, not 
of the rolling, but of the lurching character, to the flatter 
stones with which it comes in contact. It slides ponder- 
ously over them; and they, with a speed diminished in 
ratio from that of the moving power in proportion to the 



72 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

degree of friction below or around, slide over the stones 
or rock immediately beneath. And thus, to borrow my 
terminology from our Scotch law courts, they are con- 
verted at once into scratchers and scratchees. They are 
scratched by the grating, sand-armed raft, which of course 
moves quicker than they move ; and they scratch, in turn, 
the solid mass or embedded fragment along which they 
are launched. Further, if the gravelly shoals of the 
stream have, as is not uncommon in the shallows of our 
Highland rivers, their thickly-set patches of pearl mussels, 
many of these could scarce miss being crushed and broken ; 
and we would find not a few of their fragments, if much 
subjected to the friction of the rafting process, rounded at 
their edges, and mayhap scratched and polished like the 
stones. Nor is it difficult to conceive of a yet further 
consequence of the process. A vast number of rafts 
dropping down some river, from day to day and year 
to year, and always grating along the same ledges of sand- 
stone, trap, or shale, would at length very considerably 
wear them down ; and the materials of the waste, more or 
less argillaceous, according to the quality of the rock, 
would be deposited by the current in the pools and gentler 
reaches of the stream below. Even the continual tread 
of human feet in a crowded thoroughfare soon wears down 
the trap or sandstone pavement, and converts the solid 
stone into impalpable mud. Further, the color of the 
"mud or clay would correspond, as in the thoroughfare or 
public road, with the color of the rocks or stones which 
had been grooved down to form it; and there would 
occasionally mingle in the mass thus originated, rounded 
fragments of shells and pebbles, scratched in the line of 
their longer axis. 

Now, in the boulder-clay we find all these peculiarities 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 78 

remarkably exemplified. It contains, as has been shown, 
the oblong stones scratched longitudinally; we find it 
thickly charged in various parts of Scotland, though not in 
our own immediate neighborhood, with worn and rounded 
fragments of broken shells ; and we see it almost invaria- 
bly borrowing its color from the rocks on which it rests, — 
a consequence, apparently, of its being the dressings of 
these rocks. There is a peculiar kind of clay which forms 
on the surface of a hearthstone or piece of pavement, 
under the hands of a mason's laborer engaged in rubbing 
it smooth with water and a polisher of gritty sandstone. 
This clay varies in quality and color with the character of 
the stone operated upon. A flag of Arbroath pavement 
yields a bluish-colored clay ; a flag of the Old Red of Ross 
or Forfarshire, a reddish colored clay; a flag of Suther- 
landshire Oolite, or of the Upper Old Red of Moray or of 
Fife, a pale yellowish clay. The polishing process is a 
process which produces clay out of stones, as various in 
tint as the coloring of the various stones which yield it ; 
and in almost every instance does the clay thus formed 
resemble some known variety of the boulder-clay. The 
boulder-clay, in the great majority of cases, is, both in 
color and quality, just such a clay as might be produced 
by this recipe of the mason's laborer, from the rocks on 
which it rests. The red sandstone rocks of Moray, Cro- 
marty, and Ross, are covered by red boulder-clays; a 
similar red boulder-clay overlies the red sandstone rocks 
of Forfarshire ; and I was first apprised, when travelling in 
Banffshire some years ago, that I had entered on the dis- 
trict of the Old Red, by finding the boulder-clay assuming 
the familiar brick-red hue. Over the pale Oolites of Suth- 
erlandshire, as at Brora and Golspie, it is of a pale yellow 
tint, and of a yellowish red over the pale Old Red Sand- 

7 



74 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

stones of the long, flat valley known as the Howe of Fife. 
Again, in the middle and north-western districts of Caith- 
ness, where the ]3aving flagstones so well known in com- 
merce give to the prevailing rocks of the district a sombre 
tint of gray, the boulder-clay assumes, as in the neighbor- 
hood of Wick and Thurso, the leaden color of the beds 
which it overlies; while over the Coal Measures of the 
south of Scotland, as in East and West Lothian, and 
around Edinburgh, it is of a bluish-black tint, — exactly 
the color which might be premised, on the polishing the- 
ory, from the large mixture of shale-beds, coal-seams, and 
trap-rocks, which occurs amid the prevailing light-hued 
sandstones of the deposits beneath. Of course, this con- 
dition of resemblance in average color between the rocks 
and the boulder-clays of a district is but of general, not 
invariable occurrence, — the boulder-clay is not invariably 
the dressings of the rocks beneath. We may occasionally 
find the trail of the rubbings of one tract overlying, in an 
easterly direction, the deposits of a different one; just as 
we would find the rubbings of variously-colored pieces of 
pavement laid down to form a floor, and then polished, 
square by square, where they lay, encroaching, the debris 
of one square on the limits of another, in the direction of 
the outward stroke of the polisher. 

But while we thus find all the conditions of a raft- 
formed deposit in or associated with the boulder-clay, — 
such as grooved and furrowed rocks beneath, scratched 
and polished stones lined longitudinally inclosed in it, 
accompanied, in not a few instances, by rounded frag- 
ments of shells, and a general conformity in its color to 
that of the rocks on which it rests, — where in nature 
shall we find the analogues of the producing rafts them- 
selves? A native of Newfoundland, who season after 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 75 

season had seen the Arctic icebergs grating heavily along 
the coasts of the island, would experience little difficulty 
in solving the riddle. For rafts of wood we have but to 
substitute rafts of ice, a submerged land covered by many 
fathoms of water, for the shallows of the river of my illus- 
tration, and some powerful ocean current, such as the gulf 
or arctic stream, for the river itself, and we at once arrive 
at a consistent theory of the boulder-clay and its origin. 
Nor must we deem it a thing improbable, that a country 
like Scotland, which lies between the fifty-fifth and the 
fifty-ninth degree of north latitude, should be visited 
every year by icebergs. Newfoundland lies from five to 
eight degrees to the south of Scotland, and yet its north- 
ern shores are included in that vast cake of ice which, 
when winter sets fairly in, is found to stretch continu- 
ously, though in a winding line, over the surface of the 
ocean, from Nova Zembla in the Old World, to Labrador 
in the New ; and the drift ice-floes in spring, borne south- 
wards on the Arctic current, brush every season over its 
southern shores, or ground by hundreds upon its great 
bank ; nor do they finally disappear until they reach the 
fortieth, and, in at least one recorded instance, the thirty- 
sixth, degree of north latitude. I need scarce remind you 
that the temperature of a country depends on other causes 
than its distance from the equator or the pole. The iso- 
thermal line, or line of mean temperature, of the capital 
of Iceland, ReikiaviJc, in latitude 64, is nearly as high as 
that of St. John's, the capital of Newfoundland, in lati- 
tude 47 ; and old York, in the fifty-fourth degree of north 
latitude, enjoys as much average warmth throughout the 
year as New York, in the forty-first degree. Now, the 
causes which give to countries in the same latitudes 
climates so strangely different are known not to be per- 



76 LECTURES . ON GEOLOGY. 

manent causes: temperature is found to depend on the 
disposition of land and sea, and the position, not of the 
geographical pole, which is single and centrical in each 
hemisphere, but of the pole of greatest cold, which, in at 
least the northern hemisphere, is double, and not centri- 
cal, — Asia having one, and America another; and if, as 
is generally held, there be a correspondence amounting 
almost to identity between the poles of greatest cold and 
the magnetic poles, then these poles are not fixed, but 
oscillating. Nor are we left to infer on merely general 
grounds that the climate of our country may have been at 
one time greatly more severe than it is now. There is 
also zoological evidence that it was greatly more severe. 
It is a curious and significant fact, that the group of shells 
found in the boulder-clay, resting over the scratched and 
grooved rocks, and accompanying the scratched and pol- 
ished pebbles, is essentially a boreal or semi-arctic group. 
This little shell from the boulder-clay of Caithness — the 
Trophon scalariformis or Fusits scalariformis, which, 
from its small size, seems to have escaped the fate that 
crushed its larger contemporaries into fragments — is not 
now found living on our coasts, though it still exists in 
considerable abundance in the seas of Greenland; and sev- 
eral of its neighbors in the clay, such as Tellina proxima 
and Astarte JBorealis, are of the same northern character. 
Nay, in cases in which the shells of the boulder-clay still 
live in our seas, we find those of a northern character, such 
as the Gyprina Islandica, that, though not rare on the 
shores of Scotland, is vastly more abundant on those of 
Iceland, occurring, not in the present British, but in the 
present Icelandic proportions. The Gyprina Island ica is 
one of the most common shells of the clay, and, as its 
name testifies, one of the most common shells of Iceland; 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 77 

but it is by no means one of the most common shells at 
the present time of our Scottish coasts. The shells of the 
boulder-clay correspond in the group, not to the present 
shells of Scotland, but to the present shells of Iceland and 
the Northern Cape. 

Further, we are not left merely to infer that icebergs 
could, or might have grooved and worn down the rocks of 
the country: we learn from Sir Charles Lyell — unques- 
tionably a competent observer — that he caught icebergs 
almost in the very fact of grooving and wearing down 
similar rocks. In his first work of " Travels through the 
United States," he describes a visit which he paid to the 
coast of Nova Scotia, near Cape Blomidon: "As I was 
strolling along the beach," he says, " at the base of a line 
of basaltic cliffs, which rise over ledges of soft sandstone, 
I stopped short at the sight of an unexpected phenom- 
enon. The solitary inhabitant of a desert island could 
scarcely have been more startled by a human footprint in 
the sand than I was on beholding some recent furrows on 
a ledge of sandstone under my feet, the exact counterpart 
of those grooves of ancient date which I have so often 

attributed to glacial action On a recently formed 

ledge I saw several straight furrows half an inch broad, 
some of them very nearly parallel, others slightly diverg- 
ent ; and, after walking about a quarter of a mile, I found 
another set of similar furrows, having the same general 
direction within about five degrees ; and I made up my 
mind that, if these grooves could not be referred to the 
modern instrumentality of ice, it would throw no small 
doubt on the glacial hypothesis. When I asked my guide, 
a peasant of the neighborhood, whether he had ever seen 
much ice on the spot where we stood, the heat was so ex- 
cessive (for we were in the latitude of the south of France, 

7* 



78 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

45 degrees north) that I seemed to be putting a strange 
question. He replied, that in the preceding winter [that 
of 1841 J he had seen the ice, in spite of the tide, which 
ran at the rate of ten miles an hour, extending in one un- 
interrupted mass from the shore where we stood, to the 
opposite coast of Parrsborough, and that the ice- blocks, 
heaped on each other and frozen together, or packed at 
the foot of Cape Blomidon, were often fifteen feet thick, 
and were pushed along, when the tide rose, over the sand- 
stone ledges. He also stated that fragments of the black 
stone which fell from the summit of the cliff — a pile of 
which lay at its base — were often frozen into the ice, and 
moved along with it. And I have no doubt that the hard- 
ness of these gravers, firmly fixed in masses of ice, which, 
though only fifteen feet thick, are often of considerable 
horizontal extent, has furnished sufficient pressure and me- 
chanical power to groove the ledges of soft sandstone." 

Thus far Sir Charles. The boulder-clay is found in 
Scotland from deep beneath the sea-level, where it forms 
the anchoring ground of some of our finest harbors, to the 
height of from six to nine hundred feet along our hill- 
sides. The travelled boulders to which it owes its name 
have been found as high as fourteen hundred feet. Up to 
the highest of these heights icebergs at one time operated 
upon our Scottish rocks. Scotland, therefore, must in that 
icy age have been submerged to the highest of these 
heights. It must have existed as three groups of islands, — 
the Cheviot, or southern group ; the Grampian, or middle 
group ; and the Ben Weavis, or northern group. 

Let me .next advert to a peculiarity in the direction of 
the icebergs which went careering at this period over the 
submerged land. As shown by the lines and furrows 
which they have graven upon the rocks, their general 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 79 

course, with a few occasional divergences, — effects appa- 
rently, of the line of the greater valleys, — was from west 
to east. It is farther a fact, exactly correspondent in the 
evidence which it bears, that the trap eminences of the 
country — eminences of hard rock rising amid districts of 
soft sandstone, or still softer shale — have generally at- 
tached to their eastern sides sloping tali of the yielding 
strata out of which they rise, and which have been washed 
away from all their other sides. Every larger stone in a 
water-course, after the torrent fed by a thunder-shower 
has just subsided, shows, on the same principle, its trail of 
sand and shingle piled up behind it — sand and shingle 
which kept it from being swept away : and the simple ef- 
fect, when it occurs on the large scale, is known to the 
geologist as the phenomenon of "Crag and tail." The 
rock upon which Edinburgh Castle stands, existing as the 
" crag" and the sloping ridge which extends from the cas- 
tle's outer moat to Holy rood, existing as the tail, may be 
cited as a familiar instance. We find the same phenom- 
enon repeated in the Calton Hill, and in various other 
eminences in the neighborhood ; as also in the Castle Hill 
of Stirling. And in all these, and in many other cases, the 
tail which the crag protected is turned towards the east, 
indicating that the current which in the lapse of ages 
scooped out the valleys at the sides of the protecting 
crags, and in many instances formed, by its eddies, hollows 
in advance of them, just as we find hollows in advance of 
the larger stones of the water-course of my illustration, 
was a current which flowed from the west. The testi- 
mony of the ice-grooved rocks, and of the eminences 
composed of crag and tail, bear, we see, in this same line. 
Now, this westerly direction of the current seems to be 
exactly that which, reasoning from the permanent phe- 



80 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

nomena of nature, might be premised. There must have 
been trade winds in every period of the world's history, in 
which the earth revolved from west to east on its axis; 
and with trade winds the accompanying drift current. 
And, of consequence, ever since the existence of a great 
western continent, stretching far from south to north, 
there must have been also a gulf stream. The waters 
heaped up against the coasts of this western continent at 
the equator by the drift current ever flowing westwards, 
must have been always, as now, returning eastwards in 
the temperate zone, to preserve the general level of the 
ocean's surface. Ever, too, since winter took its place 
among the seasons, there must have been an arctic current. 
The ice and snows of the higher latitudes, that accumu- 
lated during the winter, must have again melted in spring, 
and early summer ; and a current must in consequence 
have set in as the seasons of these came on, just as we 
now see such a current setting in, in these seasons, in both 
hemispheres, which bears the ice of the antarctic circle far 
towards the north, and the ice of the arctic circle far to- 
wards the south. The point at which, in the existing state 
of things, the gulf stream and the arctic current come in 
contact is that occupied by the great bank of Newfound- 
land ; and by some the very existence of the bank has 
been attributed to their junction, and to the vast accumu- 
lation of gravel and stone cast down year after year from 
the drift ice to the bottom, where these two great tides 
meet and jostle. Be this as it may, the number of boul- 
ders and the quantity of pebbles and gravel strewed over 
the bottom of the western portions of the Atlantic, in the 
line of the arctic current, from the confines of Baffin's Bay 
up to the forty -fifth degree of north latitude, must be alto- 
gether enormous. Captain Scoresby counted no fewer 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY, 81 

than five hundred icebergs setting out on their southern 
voyage on the arctic current at one time. And wherever 
there are shallows on which these vast masses catch the 
bottom, or grate over it, — shallows of from thirty to a 
hundred, fathoms water, — we may safely premise that at 
the present time there is a boulder-clay in the course of 
formation, with a scratched and polished surface of rock 
lying beneath it, and containing numerous pebbles and 
boulders striated longitudinally. That the point where 
the gulf and arctic currents come in contact should now 
lie so far to the west, is a consequence of the present dis- 
position of the arctic and western continents, — perhaps 
also of the present position of the magnetic pole. A dif- 
ferent arrangement and position would give a different 
point of meeting ; and it is as little improbable that they 
should have met in the remote past some two or three 
hundred miles to the loest of what is now Scotland, as that 
in the existing period they should meet some two or three 
hundred miles to the east of what is now Newfoundland. 
The northern current would be deflected by the more pow- 
erful gulf stream into an easterly course, and would go 
sweeping over the submerged land in the direction indi- 
cated by the grooves and scratches, bearing with it every 
spring its many thousand gigantic icebergs, and its fields 
of sheet-ice many hundred square miles in extent. And 
these, armed beneath with great pebbles and boulders, or 
finding many such resting at the bottom, by grinding 
heavily along the buried surface, — like the rafts of my 
illustration along the bed of the river, — would gradually 
wear down the upper strata of the softer formations, leav- 
ing the clay which they had thus formed to be deposited 
over, and a little to the east of, the rocks that had pro- 
duced it. It is further in accordance with this. theory, that 



82 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

in Scotland generally, the deeper deposits of the boulder- 
clay occur on the eastern line of coast. The cutler, in 
whetting a tool with water on a flat Turkey stone, drives 
the gray, milky dressings detached by the friction of the 
steel from the solid mass, to the end of the stone farthest 
from himself, and there they accumulate thick in the direc- 
tion of the stroke. And so it is here. The rubbings of 
the great Scotch whetstone, acted upon by the innumer- 
able gravers and chisels whetted upon it, and held down 
or steadied by the icebergs, have been carried in the east- 
erly direction of the stroke, and deposited at the further, 
that is to say, the eastern, end of the stone. 

But fearing I have already too much trespassed on your 
time and patience, I shall leave half told for the present 
the story of the Pleistocene period in Scotland. If, in- 
stead of presenting it to you as a piece of clear, condensed 
narrative, I have led you darkly to grope your way 
through it by a series of fatiguing inductions, you will, I 
trust, sustain my apology, when I remind you that this 
dreary ice-epoch in the history of our country, still forms 
as debateable a terra incognita to the geologist as the 
dreary ice-tracts which surround the pole do to the ge- 
ographer. We have been threading our twilight way 
through a difficult North- West Passage ; and if our prog- 
ress has been in some degree one of weariness and fatigue, 
we must remember that without weariness and fatigue no 
voyager ever yet explored 

" The ice-locked secrets of that hoary deep 
Where fettered streams and frozen continents 
Lie dark and wild, beat with perpetual storm 
Of whirlwind and dire hail." 

"We might expect," says Professor Sedgwick, "that as we 
come close upon living nature, the characters of our old 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 83 

records would grow legible and clear. But just where we 
begin to enter on the history of the physical changes going 
on before our eyes, and in which we ourselves bear a part, 
our chronicle seems to fail us: a leaf has been torn out 
from Nature's book, and the succession of events is almost 
hidden from our eyes." Now, it is to this age of the drift- 
gravels and the boulder-clay that the accomplished Pro- 
fessor here refers, as represented in the geologic record by 
a torn page ; and though we may be disposed to view it 
rather as a darkened one, — much soiled, but certainly not 
awanting, — we must be content to bestow on its dim, half- 
obliterated characters, more time and care than suffice for 
the perusal of whole chapters in the earlier books of our 
history. And so, casting myself on your forbearance, I 
shall take up the unfinished story of the Pleistocene period 
in Scotland in my next address 



LECTURE SECOND. 

Problem first propounded to the Author in a Quarry — The Quarry's Two Depos- 
its, Old Red Sandstone and Boulder-Clay — The Boulder-Clay formed while the 
Land was subsiding — The Groovings and Polishings of the Rocks in the Lower 
Tarts of the Country evidences of the fact — Sir Charles Lyell's Observations 
on the Canadian Lake District — Close of the Boulder-Clay Record in Scotland 

— Its Continuance in England into the Pliocene Ages — The Trees and Animals 
of the Pre-Glacial Periods — Elephants' Tusks found in Scotland and England 
regarded as the Remains of Giants — Legends concerning them — Marine De- 
posits beneath the Pre-Glacial Forests of England -- Objections of Theologians 
to the Geological Theory of the Antiquity of the Earth and of the Human 
Race considered — Extent of the Glacial Period in Scotland — Evidences of 
Glacial Action in Glencoe, Gareloch, and the Highlands of Sutherland —Sce- 
nery of Scotland owes its Characteristics to Glacial Action— The Period of 
Elevation which succeeded the Period of Subsidence — Its Indications in 
Raised Beaches and Subsoils — How the Subsoils and Brick Clays were formed 

— Their Economic Importance— Boulder-Stones interesting Features in the 
Landscape —Their prevalence in Scotland — The more remarkable Ice-trav- 
elled Boulders described — Anecdotes of the " Travelled Stone of Petty " and 
the Standing Stone of Tornbal — Elevation of the Land during the Post-Ter- 
tiary Period which succeeded the Period of the Boulder-Clay— The Alpine 
Plants of Scotland the Vegetable Aborigines of the Country — Panoramic 
View of the Pleistocene and Post-Tertiary Periods — Modern Science not 
adverse to the Development of the Imaginative Faculty. 

I remember, as distinctly as if I had quitted it but yes- 
terday, the quarry in which, some two-and-thirty years 
ago, I made my first acquaintance with a life of toil and 
restraint, and at the same time first broke ground as a 
geologist. It formed a section about thirty feet in height 
by eighty or a hundred in length, in the front of a furze- 
covered bank, a portion of the old coast line ; and pre- 
sented an under bar. of a deep-red sandstone arranged in 
nearly horizontal strata, and an upper bar of a pale-red 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 85 

clay roughened by projecting pebbles and boulders. Both 
deposits at the time were almost equally unknown to the 
geologist. The deep-red sandstone beneath formed a por- 
tion of that ancient Old Red system which represents, as 
is now known, the second great period of vertebrate exist- 
ence on our planet, and which has proved to the palaeon- 
tologist so fertile a field of wonders : the pale clay above 
was a deposit of the boulder-clay, resting on a grooved 
and furrowed surface of rock, and containing in abundance 
its scratched and polished pebbles. Old Red Sandstone 
and boulder-clay! a broad bar of each; — such was the 
compound problem propounded to me by the Fate that 
dropped me in a quarry ; and I gave to both the patient 
study of years. But the older deposit soon became frank 
and communicative, and yielded up its organisms in abun- 
dance, which furnished me with many a curious little anec- 
dote of their habits when living, and of the changes which 
had passed over them when dead ; and I was enabled, 
with little assistance from brother geologists, to give a his- 
tory of the system to the world more than ten years ago. 
The boulder-clay, on the contrary, remained for years in- 
vincibly silent and sullen. I remember a time when, after 
passing a day under its barren scaurs, or hid in its precip- 
itous ravines, I used to feel in the evening as if I had been 
travelling under the cloud of night, and had seen nothing. 
It was a morose and taciturn companion, and had no spec- 
ulation in it. I might stand in front of its curved preci- 
pices, red, yellow, or gray (according to the prevailing 
color of the rocks on which it rested), and might mark 
their water-rolled boulders of all kinds and sizes sticking 
out in bold relief from the surface, like the j^i'otuberances 
that roughen the rustic basements of the architect ; but I 
had no " Open Sesame " to form vistas through them into 

8 



86 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

the recesses of the past. And even now, when I have, 
I think, begun to understand the boulder-clay a little, and 
it has become sociable enough to indulge me with occa- 
sional glimpses of its early history in the old glacial period, 
— glimpses of a half-submerged land, and an iceberg-mot- 
tled sea, turbid with the comminuted debris of the rocks 
below, — you will see how very much I have had to borrow 
from the labors of others, and that, in worming my way 
into its secret, there are obscure recesses within its pre- 
cincts into which I have failed to penetrate. Let us now, 
however, resume its half-told story. 

There are appearances which lead us to conclude, that 
during the formation and deposition of the boulder-clay, 
what is now Scotland was undergoing a gradual subsid- 
ence, — gradually foundering amid the waves, if I may so 
speak, like a slowly-sinking vessel, and presenting, as cen- 
tury succeeded century, hills of lower and yet lower alti- 
tude, and an ever lessening area. I was gratified to. find, 
that when reasoning out the matter for myself, and arriv- 
ing at this conclusion from the examination of one special 
set of data, Mr. Charles Darwin w^as arriving at the same 
conclusion from the consideration of a second and entirely 
different set; and Sir Charles Lyell — from whom, on the 
publication of my views in the "Witness" newspaper some 
four years since, I received a kind and interesting note on 
the subject — had also arrived at the same conclusion — 
North America being the scene of his observations — from 
the consideration of yet a third and equally distinct set. 
And in the. " Geological Journal" for the present year, I 
find Mr. Joshua Trimmer and Mr. Austin arriving, from 
evidence equally independent, at a similar finding. We 
have all come to infer, in short, that previous to the Drift 
period the land had stood at a comparatively high level, — 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 87 

perhaps higher than it does now ; that ages of depression 
came on, during which the land sank many hundred feet, 
and the sea rose high on the hill-sides ; and that during 
these ages of depression the boulder-clay was formed. 
Let me state briefly some of the considerations on which 
we found. 

The boulder-clay, I thus reasoned with myself, is gener- 
ally found to overlie more deeply the lower parts of the 
country than those higher parts which approach its upper 
limit ; and yet the rocks on which it rests, in some local- 
ities to the dej)th of a hundred feet at even the level of 
the sea, bear as decidedly their groovings and polishings 
as those on which, eight hundred feet over the sea-level, 
it reposes to but the depth of a yard or two. Now, had 
a rising land been subjected piecemeal to the grinding 
action of the icebergs, this would not have been the case. 
The higher rocks first subjected to their action would of 
course bear the groovings and furrowings ; but the argil- 
laceous dressings detached from them in the process, mixed 
with the stones and pebbles which the ice had brought 
along with it, would necessarily come to be deposited in 
the form of boulder-clay on the lower rocks ; and ere these 
lower rocks could be brought, by the elevation of the 
land, within reach of the grinding action of the icebergs, 
they would be so completely covered up and shielded by 
the deposit, that the bergs would fail to come in contact 
with them. They would go sweeping, not over the rocks 
themselves, but over the clay by which the rocks had been 
covered up; and so we may safely infer that, had the 
boulder-clay been formed during an elevating period, the 
lower rocks, where thickly covered by the clay, would not 
be scratched and grooved as we now find them, or, where 
scratched and grooved, would not be thickly covered by 



83 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

the clay. The existing phenomena, deep grooves and 
polished strire, on rocks overlaid at the present sea-level 
to a great depth by the boulder-clay, demand for their 
production the reverse condition of a sinking land, in. 
which the lower rocks are first subjected to the action of 
the icebergs, and the higher rocks after them. The quar- 
rier, when he has to operate on some stratum of rock on a 
hill-side, has to commence his labors below, and to throw 
the rubbish which he forms behind him, leaving an open 
face in front; for, were he to reverse the process, and com- 
mence above, the accumulating debris, ever seeking down- 
wards, would at length so choke up the working as to 
arrest his labors. And such, we infer from the work done, 
must have been the course of operations imposed by the 
conditions of a sinking land on the icebergs of the glacial 
period : they began their special course of action at the 
hill-foot, and operated upon its surface upwards as the 
sea arose. Again, Mr. Darwin's reasonings were mainly 
founded on the significant fact, that in numerous instances 
travelled boulders of the ice period may be found on levels 
considerably higher than those of the rocks from which 
they were originally torn. And though cases of transport 
from a lower to a higher level could and would take place 
during a period of subsidence, when the sea was rising or 
the land sinking, it is impossible that it could have taken 
place during an elevating period, when the sea was sink- 
ing or the land rising. 1 A flowing sea, to use a simple 
illustration, frequently carries shells, pebbles, and sea-w T eed 
from the level of ebb to the level of flood; — it brings 
them from a low to a hi^h level : whereas an ebbing sea 



1 See Mr. Trimmer's last paper on Boulder-Clays, " Journal of the Geo- 
logical Society," May, 18-58, p. 171. — W. S. 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 89 

can but reverse the process, by bringing them from a high 
level to a low. 

For the facts and reasonings of Sir Charles Lyell on the 
subject I must refer you — as they are incapable of being 
abridged without being injured — to that portion of his 
first work of Travels in America which treats of the Cana- 
dian Lake District. But the following are his conclusions : 
"First" he says, " the country acquired its present geo- 
graphical configuration, so far as relates to the older rocks, 
under the joint influence of elevating and denuding oper- 
ations. Secondly ; a gradual submergence then took place, 
bringing down each part of the land successively to the 
level of the waters, and then to a moderate depth below 
them. Large islands and bergs of floating ice came from 
the north, which, as they grounded on the coast and on 
shoals, pushed along all loose materials of sand and peb- 
bles, broke off all angular and projecting points of rock, 
and, when fragments of hard stone were frozen into their 
lower surfaces, scooped out grooves in the subjacent solid 
strata. Thirdly, after the surface of the rocks had been 
smoothed and grated upon by the passage of innumerable 
icebergs, the clay, gravel, and sand of the Drift were de- 
posited; and occasionally fragments of rock, both large 
and small, which had been frozen into glaciers, or taken 
up by coast-ice, were dropped here and there at random 
over the bottom of the ocean, wherever they happened to 
be detached from the melting ice. Finally, the j)eriod of 
reelevation arrived, or of that intermittent upward move- 
ment in which the old coast lines were excavated and the 
ancient sand bars or osars laid down." Such are the con- 
clusions at which Sir Charles Lyell arrived a few years 
since respecting the Canadian Lake District ; and he 
states, in the note to which I have referred, that he has 

8* 



90 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

ever since been applying them to Scotland. Our country, 
during the chill and dreary period of the boulder-clay, 
seems to have been settling down into the waves, like the 
vessel of some hapless Arctic explorer struck by the ice 
in middle ocean, and sinking by inches amid a wild scene 
of wintry desolation. 

There are a few detached localities in Scotland where 
the remains of beds of stratified sand and gravel have 
been detected underlying the boulder-clay; and in some 
of these in the valley of the Clyde, Mr. Smith, of Jordan- 
hill, found, on a late occasion, shells of the same semi- 
arctic character as those which occur in the clay itself. 
And with these stratified beds the record in Scotland 
closes; whereas in England we find it carried interest- 
ingly onward from the Pleistocene period, first into the 
newer, and then into the older, Pliocene ages. I stated 
incidentally in my former address, that some of the mosses 
of the sister kingdom, unlike those of our own country, 
are older than the Drift period ; and, from the existence of 
these under the Drift gravels and brown clay, it has been 
inferred by Mr. Trimmer, that as the trees which enter 
into their composition grew upon the surface of what is 
now England, where they now lie, previous to the period 
of the boulder-clay, and as the boulder-clay is, as shown 
by its remains, decidedly marine, it must have been depos- 
ited during a period of depression, wdien what had been a 
forest-bearing surface was lowered beneath the level of the 
sea. None of the trees of these ancient pre-glacial forests 
seem to be of extinct species; the birch and Scotch fir 
are among their commonest forms, especially the fir. I 
find it stated, however, as a curious fact, that along with 
these, the Abies Excelsa, or Norwegian spruce-pine, is 
found to occur, — a tree which, though introduced by man 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 91 

into our country, and now not very rare in our woods, has 
not been of indigenous growth in any British forest since 
the times of the boulder-clay. Though the species con- 
tinued to live in Norway, it became extinct in Britain ; 
and it has been suggested, that as it was during the Drift 
period that it disappeared, it may have owed its extirpa- 
tion to the depression of the land, while its contemporaries 
the birch and fir were preserved on our northern heights. 
When this Norwegian pine flourished in Britain, the island 
was inhabited by a group of quadrupeds now never seen 
associated, save j^erhaps in a menagerie. Mixed with the 
remains of animals still native to our country, such as the 
otter, the badger, and the red deer, there have been found 
skeletons of the Lagomy, or tailless hare, now an inhab- 
itant of the cold heights of Siberia, and horns of the rein- 
deer, a species now restricted in Europe to northern 
Scandinavia, and those inhospitable tracts of western 
Russia that border on the Arctic Sea. And with these 
boreal forms there were associated, as shown by their bones 
and tusks, the elephant, the rhinoceros, and the hippopota- 
mus, — all, however, of extinct species, and fitted for liv- 
ing under widely different climatal conditions from those 
essential to the well-being of their intertropical congeners. 1 
Scotland, though it has proved much less rich than Eng- 
land in the remains of the early Pleistocene mammals, has 
furnished a few well-attested elephantine fossils. In the 
summer of 1821, in the course of cutting the Union Canal, 
there was found in the boulder-clay near Falkirk, on the 
Clifton Hall property, about twenty feet from the surface, 

1 The true mammoth, with the tichorine rhinoceros and the musk buf- 
falo, are the leading types of the mammalian fauna of the Glacial Drift 
epoch. The remains of hippopotamus would he washed out of older beds. 
— W. S. 



92 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

a large portion of the tusk of an elephant, three feet three 
inches in length, and thirteen inches in circumference ; and 
such was its state of keeping when first laid open, that it 
was sold to an ivory-turner by the laborers that found it, 
and was not rescued from his hands until a portion of it 
had been cut up for chessmen. Two other elephants' 
tusks were found early in 1817, at Kilmaurs, 1 in Ayrshire, 
on a property of the Earl of Eglinton, — one of them so 
sorely decayed that it could not be removed ; but a portion 
of the other, with the rescued portion of the Falkirk tusk, 
may be seen in the Museum of our Edinburgh University, 
which also contains, I may here mention, the horn of a 
rhinoceros, found at the bottom of a morass in Forfarshire, 
but which, in all probability, as it stands alone among the 
organisms of our mosses, had been washed out of some 
previously formed deposit of the Drift period. Scotland 
seems to have famished several other specimens of ele- 
phantine remains ; but as they were brought to light in 
ages in which comparative anatomy was unknown, and 
men believed that the human race had been of vast 
strength and stature in the primeval ages, but were fast 
sinking into dwarfs, they were regarded as the remains of 
giants. Some of the legends to which the bones of these 
supposed giants served to give rise in England, occupy a 
place in the first chapter of the country's history, as told 
by the monkish chroniclers, and have their grotesque but 
widely-known memorials in Gog and Magog, the wooden 
giants of Guildhall : our Scottish legends of the same class 
are less famous ; but to one of their number — charged 

1 At a later period (December 1829), similar elephantine tusks were 
found thirty-four feet beneath the surface, in boulder-clay overlying the 
quarry of Grcenhill, also in Kilmaurs parish; and they may now be seen 
in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow. 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 93 

with an argument in behalf of the temperance cause of 
which our friends the teetotalers have not yet availed 
themselves — I may be permitted briefly to refer, in the 
words of one of our elder historians. "In Murray land," 
says the believing Hector Boece, "is the Kirke of Pette, 
quhare the bones of Litell Johne remainis in gret admira- 
tion of pepill. He hes bene fourtene feet of hicht, with 
squaire membres effering thairto. Six yeirs afore the 
coming of this work to licht (1520), we saw his henche 
bane, as meikle as the haill banes of ane manne ; for we 
schot our arme into the mouthe thairof ; be quhilk appeirs 
how Strang and squaire pepill greu in oure regeoun afore 
thay were effeminat with lust and intemperance of mouthe." 
Under these pre-glacial forests of England there rests a 
marine deposit, rich in shells and quadrupedal remains, 
known as the Norwich or Mammaliferous Crag; and be- 
neath it, in turn, lie the Red and Coralline Crags, — mem- 
bers of the Pliocene period. In the Mammaliferous Crag 
there appear a few extinct shells, blent with shells still 
common on our coasts. In the Red Crag the number of 
extinct species greatly increases, rising, it is now estimated, 
to thirty per cent, of the whole ; while in the Coralline 
Crag the increase is greater still, the extinct shells averag- 
ing about forty per cent. 1 In these deposits some of our 
best known molluscs appear in creation for the first time. 
The common edible oyster (Ostrea edulis) occurs in the 
Coralline Crag, but in no older formation, and with it the 
great pecten (JPecten maximus), the horse mussel (Modi- 
ola vulgaris), and the common whelk {JBuccinum unda- 
tum). Other equally well-known shells make their advent 

1 The known species of shells in the Coralline Crag amount to three 
hundred and forty. Of these, seventy-three are living British species. 
Sec Woodward's " Manual," part iii. p. 421. — W. S. 



94 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

at a still later period ; the common mussel (Mytilus edit- 
lis), the common periwinkle (Littorina littorea), and, in 
Britain at least, the dog-whelk (Purpura lapittus), first 
appear in the overlying Red Crag, and are not known in 
the older Coralline formation. By a certain very extended 
period, represented by the Coralline Crag, the edible oyster 
seems to be older than the edible mussel, and the common 
whelk than the common periwinkle ; and I call your spe- 
cial attention to the fact, as representative of a numerous 
class of geological facts that bear on certain questions of 
a semi-theological character, occasionally mooted in the 
religious periodicals of the day. There are few theolo- 
gians w r orthy of the name who now hold that the deduc- 
tions of the geologists regarding the earth's antiquity are 
at variance with the statements of Scripture respecting 
its first creation, and subsequent preparation for man. 
But some of them do seem to hold that the scheme of 
reconciliation, found sufficient when this fact of the earth's 
antiquity was almost the only one with which we had to 
grapple, should be deemed sufficient still, wdien science, in 
its onw^ard progress, has called on us to deal with this new 
fact of the very unequal antiquity of the plants and ani- 
mals still contemporary w 7 ith man, and with the further 
fact, that not a few of them must have been living upon 
the earth thousands of years ere he himself was ushered 
upon it, — facts of course wholly incompatible with any 
scheme of interpretation that would fix the date of their 
first appearance only a few-natural days in advance of that 
of his own. We have no good reason to hold that the 
human species existed upon earth during the times of the 
boulder-clay: such a belief would conflict, as shown by the 
antiquity of the ancient and existing coast lines, with our 
received chronologies of the race. But long previous to 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 95 

these times, the Norwegian spruce pine and the Scotch fir 
were natives of the pre-glacial forests of our country ; at 
even an earlier period the common periwinkle and edible 
mussel lived in the seas of the Red Crag deposits; and at 
a still earlier time, the great pecten, the whelk, and the 
oyster, in those of the Coralline Crag. We can now no 
more hold, as geologists, that the plants and animals of 
the existing creation came into being only a few hours 
or a few days previous to man, than that the world itself 
came into being only six thousand years ago ; and we do 
think we have reason to complain of theologians who, 
ignorant of the facts with which we have to deal, and in 
no way solicitous to acquaint themselves with them, set 
themselves coolly to criticize our well-meant endeavors to 
reconcile the Scripture narrative of creation with the more 
recent findings of our science, and who pronounce them 
inadmissible, not because they do not effect the desired 
reconciliation, but simply because they are new to theol- 
ogy. They should remember that the difficulty also is 
new to theology; that enigmas cannot be solved until 
they are first propounded; that- if the riddle be in reality 
a new one, the answer to it must of necessity be new like- 
wise ; and as this special riddle has been submitted to the 
geologists when the theologians were unaware of its exist- 
ence, it must not be held a legitimate objection, that geolo- 
gists, who feel that they possess, as responsible men, a stake 
in the question, should be the first to attempt solving it. 
If, however, it be, as I suspect, with our facts, not with our 
schemes of reconciliation, that the quarrel in reality lies, 
— if it be, in particular, with the special fact of the une- 
qual antiquity of the existing plants and animals, and the 
comparatively recent introduction of man, — I would fain 
urge the objectors to examine ere they decide, and not 



9b LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

rashly and in ignorance to commit themselves against 
truths which every clay must render more palpable and 
clear, and which are destined long to outlive all cavil and 
opposition. 

With respect to the antiquity of our race, we have, as I 
have said, no good grounds to believe that man existed 
upon the earth during what in Britain, and that portion 
of the continent which lies under the same lines of lati- 
tude, were the times of the boulder-clay and Drift gravels. 
None of the human remains yet found seem more ancient 
than the historic period, in at least the older nations ; it is 
now held that the famous skeletons of Guadaloupe be- 
longed to men and women who must have lived since the 
discovery, of America by Columbus; and if in other parts 
of the world there have been detected fragments of the 
human frame associated with those of the long extinct 
animals, there is always reason to conclude that they owe 
such proximity to that burying propensity to which I have 
already adverted, or to accidents resulting from it, and not 
to any imaginary circumstance of contemporarity of exist- 
ence. If man buries his dead in the Gault or the London 
Clay, human remains will of course be found mingled with 
those of the Gault or the London Clay; but the evidence 
furnished by any such mixture will merely serve to show, 
not that the existences to which the remains belonged had 
lived in the same age, but simply that they had been 
deposited in the same formation. Nor can I attach much 
value to the supposed historic records of countries such as 
Egypt, in which dynasties are represented as having flour- 
ished thousands of years ere the era of Abraham. The 
chronicles of all nations have their fabulous introductory 
portions. No one now attaches any value to the record 
of the eighty kings that are said to have reigned in Scot- 



LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 97 

land between the times of Fergus the First and Constan- 
tine the Bold ; or to that portion of old English history 
which treats of the dynasty of Brutus the Parricide, or 
his wars with the giants. All the ancient histories have, 
as Buchanan tells us, in disposing of the English claims, 
their beginnings obscured by fable ; nor is it probable that 
the Egyptian history is an exception to all the others, or 
that its laboriously inscribed and painfully interpreted 
hieroglyphics were more exclusively devoted to the re- 
cording of real events than characters simpler of form and 
easier of perusal. If, as some contend, man has been a 
denizen of this world for some ten or twelve thousand 
years, what, I would ask, was he doing the first five or six 
thousand? It was held by Sir Isaac Newton, that the 
species must have been of recent introduction on earth, 
seeing that all the great human discoveries and inventions, 
such as letters, the principles of geometry and arithmetic, 
printing, and the mariner's compass, lie within the historic 
period. The mind of man could not, he inferred, have 
been very long at work, or, from its very constitution, it 
would have discovered and invented earlier ; and all his- 
tory and all archaeological research bear out the inference 
of the philosopher. The older civilized nations lie all 
around the original centre of the race in Western Asia ; 
nor do we find any trace of a great city older than Nine- 
veh, or of a great kingdom that preceded in its rise that 
of Egypt. The average life of great nations does not 
exceed twelve, or at most fifteen, hundred years ; and the 
first great nations were, we find, living within the memory 
of letters. Geology, too, scarce less certainly than Reve- 
lation itself, testifies that the last-born of creation was 
man, and that his appearance on earth is one of the most 

9 



98 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

recent events of which it submits the memorials to its 
votaries. 

But to return : The glacial or ice period in Scotland 
seems to have extended from the times of the stratified 
beds, charged with sub-arctic shells, which underlie the 
boulder-clay, until the land, its long period of depression 
over, was again rising, and had attained to an elevation 
less by only fifty or a hundred feet than that which it at 
present maintains. Such is the height over the sea-level, 
of the raised beach at Gamrie in Banffshire ; and in it the 
arctic shells last appear. And to the greatly-extended 
sub-arctic period in Scotland there belong a class of ap- 
pearances which have been adduced in support of a glacial 
as opposed to an iceberg theory. But there is in reality no 
antagonism in the case. After examining not a few of 
our Highland glens, especially those on the north-western 
coast of the country, I have arrived at the conviction, 
that Scotland had at one time its glaciers, which, like those 
of Iceland, descended along its valleys, from its inland 
heights, to the sea. And as in most cases certain well- 
marked accompaniments of the true glacier, such as those 
lateral and transverse moraines of detached rock and 
gravel that accumulate along their sides and at their lower 
terminations, are wanting in Scotland, it is inferred that 
great currents must have swept over the country since the 
period of their existence, and either washed their moraines 
away, or so altered their character and appearance that 
they can be no longer recognized as moraines. Of course, 
this sweeping process might have taken place during that 
period of profound subsidence when the boulder-clay was 
formed, and in a posterior period of more partial subsidence, 
which is held to have taken place at a later time and un- 
der milder climatal conditions, and which is said to have 



LECTURES Otf GEOLOGY. 99 

brought clown the land to its present level from a considera- 
bly higher one. In many localities there rests over the true 
boulder-clay an argillaceous or gravelly deposit, in which 
the masses and fragments of rock are usually angular, ar>"* 
which, even where the boulder-clay is shell-bearing, coi** 
tains no shells. There are other localities in which a siur*' 
ilar deposit also underlies the boulder-clay; and these 
deposits, upper and lower, are in all probability the debris 
of glaciers that existed in our country during the ice era, 
— the lower deposit being the debris of glaciers that had 
existed previous to the glacial period of subsidence, and 
the upper that of glaciers which had existed posterior to 
it, and when the land was rising. The evidence is, I think, 
conclusive, that glaciers there were. I examined, during 
the autumn of last year, the famous Glencoe, and can now 
entertain no more doubt that a glacier once descended 
along the bottom of that deep and rugged valley, filling it 
up from side to side to the depth of from a hundred and 
fifty to two hundred feet, than that an actual glacier de- 
scends at the present day along the valley of the Aar or 
of the Grindelwald. The higher precipices of Glencoe are 
among the most rugged in the kingdom: we reach a cer- 
tain level; and, though no change takes place in the qual- 
ity of the rock, all becomes rounded and smooth, through 
the agency, evidently, of the vanished ice river, whose old 
line of surface we can still point out from the continuous 
mark on the sides of precipices, beneath which all is smooth, 
and above which all is rugged, and whose scratchings and 
groovings we can trace on the hard porphyry descending 
towards the Atlantic, even beyond where the sea occupies 
the bottom of the valley. The lines and grooves running 
in a reverse direction to those of the icebergs, for their 
course is towards the west, are distinctly discernible as far 

&.0FC, 



100 LECTURES Otf GEOLOGY. 

clown as Ballachulish ferry. Similar marks of a great gla- 
cier in the valley of the Gareloch have been carefully 
traced and shrewdly interpreted by Mr. Charles M'Laren. 
But nowhere have I seen the evidence of glacial action 
more decided than in the Highlands of Sutherland, over 
which I travelled last August more than a hundred and 
fifty miles, for the purpose of observation. There is scarce 
a valley in that wild region, whether it open towards the 
northern or western Atlantic, or upon the German Ocean, 
that in this ungenial period was not cumbered, like the 
valleys of the upper Alps, by its burden of slowly descend- 
ing ice. Save where, in a few localities on the lower slopes 
of the hills, the true boulder-clay appears, almost all the 
subsoil of the country, where it has a subsoil, is composed 
of a loose, unproductive glacial debris ; almost every 
prominence on the mountain-sides is rounded by the long- 
protracted action of the ice; and in many instances the 
surfaces of the rocks bear the characteristic groovings and 
scratchings as distinctly as if it had performed its work 
upon them but yesterday. Let me, however, repeat the 
remark, that the iceberg and glacial theories, so far from 
being antagonistic, ought rather to be regarded as equally 
indispensable parts of one and the same theory, — parts 
which, when separated, leave a vast amount of residual 
phenomena to puzzle and perplex, that we find fully ac- 
counted for by their conjunction. And why not conjoin 
them? The fact that more than four thousand square 
miles of the interior of Iceland are covered by glaciers, is 
in no degree invalidated by the kindred fact that its shores 
are visited every spring by hundreds of thousands of ice- 
bergs. 

The glaciers of Scotland have, like its icebergs, contrib- 
uted their distinctive quota to the scenery of the country. 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 101 

The smoothed and rounded prominences of the hills, bare 
and gray amid the scanty heath, and that often after a sud- 
den shower gleam bright to the sun, like the sides and 
bows of windward-beating vessels wet by the spray of a 
summer gale, form well-marked features in the landscapes 
of the north-western parts of Sutherland and Ross, espec- 
ially in the gneiss and quartz-rock districts. The lesser 
islets, too, of these tracts, whether they rise in some soli- 
tary lochan among the hills, or in some arm of the sea 
that deeply indents the coast, still bear the rounded form 
originally communicated by the ice, and in some instances 
remind the traveller of huo*e whales heaving their smooth 
backs over the brine. Further, we not unfrequently see 
the general outline of the mountains affected ; — all their 
peaks and precipices curved backwards in the direction 
ichence the glacier descended, and more angular and ab- 
rupt in the direction towards whicJi it descended. But 
it is in those groups of miniature hills, composed of glacial 
debris, which so frequently throng the openings of our 
Highland valleys, and which Burns so graphically describes 
in a single line as 

" Hillocks dropt in Nature's careless haste," 

that perhaps the most pleasing remains of our ancient gla- 
ciers are to be found. They seem to be modified moraines, 
and usually affect regular forms, resembling in some in- 
stances the roofs of houses, and in some the bottoms of 
upturned ships; and, grouped thick together, and when 
umbrageous with the graceful birch, or waving from top to 
base with the light fronds of the lady-fern and the bracken, 
they often compose scenes of a soft and yet wild loveli~ 
ness, from which the landscape gardener might be content 
to borrow, and which seem to have impressed in a very 

9* 



102 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

early age the Celtic imagination. They constitute the 
fairy Tomhans of Highland mythology; and many a curi- 
ous legend still survives, to tell of benighted travellers 
who, on one certain night of the year, of ghostly celebrity, 
have seen open doors in their green sides, whence gleams 
of dazzling light fell on the thick foliage beyond, and have 
heard voices of merriment and music resounding from 
within; or who, mayhap, incautiously entering, have lis- 
tened entranced to the song, or stood witnessing the 
dance, until, returning to the open air, they have found 
that in what seemed a brief half hour half a lifetime had 
passed away. There are few of the remoter valleys of the 
Highlands that have not their groups of fairy Tomhans, 
— memorials of the age of ice. 

After the lapse of ages — but who can declare their 
number? — the period of subsidence represented by the 
boulder-clay came to a close, and a period of elevation 
succeeded. The land began to rise ; and there is consid- 
erable extent of superficial deposits in Scotland which we 
owe to this period of elevation. It is the main object of 
the ingenious work of Mr. Robert Chambers on Raised 
Beaches to show that there were pauses in the elevating 
process, during which the lines against which the waves 
beat were hollowed into rectilinear terraces, much broken, 
it is true, and widely separated in their parts, but that 
wonderfully correspond in height over extensive areas. 
It is of course to be expected, that the higher and more 
ancient the beach or terrace, the more must it be worn 
down by the action of the elements, especially by the 
descent of water-courses; and as the supposed beaches 
intermediate between the strongly-marked ancient coast 
line which I have already described at such length, and 
certain upper lines traceable in the moorland districts of 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 103 

the country, occur in an agricultural region, the obliterat- 
ing wear of the plough has been added to that of the cli- 
mate. After, however, all fair allowances have been made, 
there remain great difficulties in the way. I have been 
puzzled, for instance, by the fact that Scotland presents us 
with but two lines of water-worn caves, — 'that of the 
present coast line, and that of the old line immediately 
above it. Mr. Chambers enumerates no fewer than fifteen 
coast lines intermediate between the old coast line and a 
coast line about three hundred feet over it ; and in the 
range of granitic rocks which skirt on both sides the en- 
trance of the Cromarty Frith, there are precipices fully a 
hundred yards in height, and broadly exposed to the 
stormy north-east, whose bases bear their double lines of 
deeply-hollowed caverns. But they exhibit no third, or 
fourth, or fifth line of caves. Equally impressible through- 
out their entire extent of front, and with their inclosed 
masses of chloritic schist and their lines of fault as thickly 
set in their brows as in their bases, they yet present no 
upper stories of caves. Had the sea stood at the fifteen 
intermediate lines for periods at all equal in duration to 
those in which it has stood at the ancient or existing coast 
line, the taller precipices of the Cromarty Sutors would 
present their seventeen stories of excavations ; and exca- 
vations in hard granitic gneiss that varied from twenty to 
a hundred feet in depth would form marks at least as in- 
delible as parallel roads on the mountain sides, or mounds 
of gravel and debris overtopping inland plains, or rising 
over the course of rivers. The want of lines of caves 
higher than those of the ancient coast line would seem to 
indicate, that though the sea may have remained long 
enough at the various upper levels to leave its mark on 
soft, impressible materials, it did not remain long enough 
to excavate into caverns the solid rocks. 



104 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

But though the rise of the land may have been compar- 
atively rapid, there was quite time enough during the term 
of upheaval for a series of processes that have given con- 
siderable variety to the subsoils of our country. Had the 
land been elevated at one stride, almost the only subsoil 
of what we recognize as the agricultural region of Scot- 
land would have been the boulder-clay, here and there 
curiously inlaid with irregular patches of sand and gravel, 
which occur occasionally throughout its entire thickness, 
and which were probably deposited in the forming mass by 
icebergs, laden at the bottom with the sand and stones of 
some sea-beach, on which they had lain frozen until floated 
off, with their burdens, by the tide. But there elapsed 
time enough, during the uj)heaval of the land, to bring its 
boulder-clay deposits piecemeal under the action of the 
tides and waves; and hence, apparently, the origin of not 
a few of our lighter subsoils. Wherever the waves act at 
the present time upon a front of clay, we see a separation 
of its parts taking place. Its finer argillaceous particles 
are floated off to sea, to be deposited in the outer depths ; 
its arenaceous particles settle into sand-beds a little adown 
the beach ; its pebbles and boulders form a surface stratum 
of stones and gravel, extending from the base of the scaur 
to where the surf breaks at the half-tide line. We may 
see a similar process of separation going on in ravines of 
the boulder-clay swept by a streamlet. After every shower 
the stream comes down brown and turbid with the more 
argillaceous portions of the deposit ; accumulations of 
sand are swept to the gorge of the ravine, or cast down in 
ripple-marked patches in its deeper pools ; beds of pebbles 
and gravel are heaped up in every inflection of its banks ; 
and boulders are laid bare along its sides. Now, a separa- 
tion by a sort of washing process of an analogous charac- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 105 

ter seems to have taken place in the materials of the more 
exposed portions of the boulder-clay, during the emergence 
of the land ; and hence, apparently, those extensive beds 
of sand ancl gravel which in so many parts of the kingdom 
exist in relation to the clay as a superior or upper subsoil ; 
hence, too, occasional beds of a purer clay than that be- 
neath, divested of a considerable portion of its arenaceous 
components, and of almost all its pebbles and boulders. 
This washed clay — a re-formation of the boulder deposit 

— cast down mostly in insulated beds in quiet localities, 
where the absence of currents suffered the purer particles, 
held in suspension by the water, to settle, forms, in Scot- 
land at least, — with, of course, the exception of the ancient 
fire-clays of the Coal Measures, — the true brick and tile 
clays of the agriculturist and architect. There are exten- 
sive beds of this washed clay within a short distance of 
Edinburgh ; and you might find it no uninteresting em- 
ployment to compare them, in a leisure hour, with the 
very dissimilar boulder-clays over w^hich they rest. Unlike 
the latter, they are finely laminated : in the brick beds of 
Portobello I have seen thin streaks of coal-dust, and occa- 
sionally of sand, occurring between the layers; but it is 
rare indeed to find in them a single pebble. They are the 
washings, in all likelihood, of those boulder-clays which 
rise high on the northern flanks of the Pentlands, and 
occur in the long, flat valley along which the Edinburgh 
and Glasgow Railway runs, — washings detached by the 
waves when the land was rising, and which, carried towards 
the east by the westward current, were quietly deposited 
in the lee of Arthur Seat and the neighboring eminences, 

— at that time a small group of islands. The only shells 
I ever detected in the brick-clay of Scotland occurred in a 
deposit in the neighborhood of St. Andrew's, of appar- 



106 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

ently the same age as the beds at Portobello. 1 They were 
in a bad state of keeping ; but I succeeded in identifying 
one of the number as a deep-sea Balanus, still thrown 
ashore in considerable quantity among the rocks to the 
south of St. Andrew's. In this St. Andrew's deposit, too, 
I found the most modern nodules I have yet seen in Scot- 
land, for they had evidently been hardened into stone dur- 
ing the recent period; but, though I laid them open by 
scores, I failed to detect in them anything organic. Sim- 
ilar nodules of the Drift period, not unfrequent in Canada 
and the United States, are remarkable for occasionally 
containing the only ichthyolite found by Agassiz among 
seventeen hundred species, which still continues to live, 
and that can be exhibited, in consequence, in duplicate 
specimens, — the one fit for the table in the character of a 
palatable viand, — the other for the shelves of a geological 
museum in the character of a curious ichthyolite. It is 
the Mallotus villosus, or Capelan (for such is its market- 
name), a little fish of the arctic and semi-arctic seas. " The 
Mallotus is abundant," says Mr. James Wilson, in his ad- 
mirable "Treatise on Fishes," "in the arctic seas, where 
it is taken in immense profusion when approaching the 
coasts to spawn, and is used as the principal bait for cod. 
A few are cured and brought to this country in barrels, 
where they are sold, and used as a relish by the curious in 
wines." 

Let me next call your attention to the importance, in an 
economic point of view, of the great geologic events which 
gave to our country its subsoils, more especially the boul- 
der-clay. This deposit varies in value, according to the 
nature of the rocks out of which it was formed ; but it is, 
even Avhere least fertile, a better subsoil than the rock 

1 See Note at the end of the Lectures. 



LECTURES ON" GEOLOGY. 107 

itself would have been ; and in many a district it furnishes 
our heaviest wheat soils. To the sand and gravel formed 
out of it, and spread partially over it, we owe a class of 
soils generally light, but kindly; and the brick clays are 
not only of considerable value in themselves, but of such 
excellence as a subsoil, that the land which overlies them 
in the neighborhood of Edinburgh still lets at from four 
to five pounds per acre. I suspect that, in order to be 
fully able to estimate the value of a subsoil, one would 
need to remove to those rocky lands of the south that 
seem doomed to hopeless barrenness for want of one. It 
is but a tedious process through which the minute lichen 
or dwarfish moss, settling on a surface of naked stone, 
forms, in the course of ages, a soil for plants of greater 
bulk and a higher order; and had Scotland been left to 
the exclusive operation of this slow agent, it would be still 
a rocky desert, with perhaps here and there a strip of allu- 
vial meadow by the side of a stream, and here and there 
an insulated patch of mossy soil among the hollows of the 
crags ; but, though it might possess its few gardens for the 
spade, it would have no fields for the plough. We owe 
our arable land to that geologic agent which, grinding 
down, as in a mill, the upper layers of the surface rocks of 
the kingdom, and then spreading over the eroded strata 
their own debris, formed the general basis in which the 
first vegetation took root, and in the course of years com- 
posed the vegetable mould. A foundering land under a 
severe sky, beaten by tempests and lashed by tides, with 
glaciers half choking up its cheerless valleys, and with 
countless icebergs brushing its coasts and grating over its 
shallows, would have seemed a melancholy and hopeless 
object to human eye, had there been human eyes to look 
upon it at the time ; and yet such seem to have been the 



108 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

circumstances in which our country was placed by Him 
who, to "perforin his wonders," 

" Plants his footsteps in the sea, 
And rides upon the storm," 

in order that at the appointed period it might, according 
to the poet, be a land 

" Made hlithe by plough and harrow." 

From the boulder-clay there is a natural transition to the 
boulders themselves, from which the deposit derives its 
name. These remarkable travelled stones seem, from the 
old traditions connected with some of them, to have awak- 
ened attention and excited wonder at an early period, long 
ere Geology was known as a science ; nor are they without 
their share of picturesqueness in certain situations. You 
will perhaps remember how frequently, and with what 
variety of aspect, Bewick, the greatest of wood engravers, 
used to introduce them into the backgrounds of his vig- 
nettes. " A rural scene is never perfect," says Shenstone, a 
poet of no very large calibre, but the greatest of landscape 
gardeners, " without the addition of some kind of building : 
I have, however, known," he adds, " a scaur of rock in 
great measure supplying the deficiency." And the justice 
of the poet's canon may be often seen exemplified in those 
more recluse districts of the country which border on the 
Highlands, and where a huge rock-like boulder, roughened 
by mosses and lichens, may be seen giving animation and 
cheerfulness to the wild solitude of a deep forest-glade, or 
to some bosky inflection of bank waving with birch and 
hazel on the side of some lonely tarn or haunted streamlet. 
Even on a dark, sterile moor, "where the pale lichen springs 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 109 

up among the stunted heath, and the hairy club-moss goes 
creeping among the stones, some vast boulder, rising gray 
amid the waste, gives to the- fatigued eye a reposing point, 
on which it can rest for a time, and then let itself out on 
the expanse around. Boulder-stones are still very abun- 
dant in Scotland, though for the last century they have 
been gradually disappearing from the more cultivated 
tracts where there were fences or farm steadings to be 
built, or where they obstructed the course of the plough. 
We find them occurring in every conceivable situation : 
high on hill-sides, where the shepherd crouches beside them 
for shelter in a shower; deep in the oj)en sea, where they 
entangle the nets of the fisherman on his fishing banks ; on 
inland moors, where in some remote age they were labori- 
ously rolled together to form the Druidical circle or Pict's 
House ; or on the margin of the coast, where they had been 
piled over one another at a later time, as protecting bul- 
warks against the waves. They are no longer to be seen in 
this neighborhood in what we may term the agricultural 
region; but they still occur in great numbers along the 
coast, within the belt that intervenes between high and low 
water, and on an upper moorland zone over which the 
plough has not yet passed. Mr. Charles M'Laren describes, 
in his admirable little work on " The Geology of Fife and 
the Lothians," a boulder of mica schist weighing from eight 
to ten tons, which rests, among many others, on one of the 
Pentland Hills, and which derives an interest from the fact 
that, as shown by the quality of the rock, the nearest point 
from which it could have come is at least fifty miles away. 
A well-known greenstone boulder of still larger size may be 
seen at the line of half-ebb, about half-way between Leith 
and Portobello. But though about ten feet in height, it is 
a small stone, compared with others of its class both in this 

10 



110 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

country and the Continent. The rock, as it is well termed 
(for it is a mass of granite weighing fifteen hundred tons), 
on which the colossal statue- of Peter the Great at St. 
Petersburg is placed, is a travelled boulder, which was 
found dissociated from every other stone of its kind in the 
middle of a morass ; and Sir Roderick Murchison describes, 
in one of his papers on the Northern Drift, a Scandinavian 
boulder thirty feet in height by one hundred and forty in 
circumference. Most, if not all the boulders which we find 
in this part of the country on the lower zone, have been 
washed out of the boulder-clay. Wherever we find a 
group of boulders on the portion of sea-bottom uncovered 
by the ebb, we have but to look at the line where the surf 
breaks when the sea is at full, and there we find the clay 
itself, with its half-uncovered boulders projecting from its 
yielding sides, apparently as freshly grooved and scratched 
as if the transporting iceberg had been at work upon them 
but yesterday. 

I must again adduce the evidence of Sir Charles Lyell, 
to show that masses of this character are frequently ice- 
borne. " In the river St. Lawrence," we find him stating in 
his " Elements," "the loose ice accumulates on the shoals 
during the winter, at which season the water is low. The 
separate fragments of ice are readily frozen together in a 
climate where the temperature is sometimes thirty degrees 
below zero, and boulders become entangled with them ; so 
that in spring, when the river rises on the melting of the 
snow, the ice is floated off, frequently conveying the bould- 
ers to great distances. A single block of granite fifteen 
feet long by ten feet both in breadth and height, and which 
could not contain less than fifteen hundred cubic feet of 
stone, was in this way moved down the river several hun- 
dred yards, during the late survey in 1837. Heavy anchors 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. Ill 

of ships lying on the shore have in like manner been closed 
in and removed. In October 1808 wooden stakes were 
driven several feet into the ground at one part of the banks 
of the St. Lawrence at high-water mark, and over them 
were piled many boulders as large as the united force of six 
men could roll. The year after, all the boulders had dis- 
appeared, and others had arrived, and the stakes had been 
drawn out and carried away by the ice." 

Our Scottish boulders — though in many instances im- 
mediately associated, as in this neighborhood, with the 
boulder-clay, and in many others, as in our moorland dis- 
tricts, with the bare rock — occur in some cases associated 
with the superficial sands and gravels, and rest upon or 
over these. And in these last instances they must have 
been the subjects of a course of ice-borne voyagings subse- 
quent to the earlier course, and when the land was rising. 
Even during the last sixty years, though our winters are 
now far from severe, there have been instances in Scotland 
of the transport of huge stones by the agency of ice ; and 
to two of these, as of a character suited to throw some 
light on the boulder voyagings of the remote past, I must 
be permitted to refer. 

Some of my audience may have heard of a boulder well 
known on both sides of the Moray Frith as the " Travelled 
Stone of Petty," — a district which includes the Moor of 
Culloden, and at whose parish church Hector Boece saw 
the gigantic bones of the colossal Little John. The Clach 
dhu ?i-Aban, or black stone of the white bog, — for such is 
the graphically descriptive Gaelic name of the moss, — 
measures about six feet in height by from six to seven feet 
in breadth and thickness, and served, up to the 19th of 
February 1799, as a march-stone between the properties of 
Castle Stuart and Culloden. It lay just within flood- 



112 LECTUP.ES ON GEOLOGY. 

mark, near where a little stream empties itself into a shallow 
sandy bay. There had been a severe, long-continued frost 
throughout the early part of the month ; and the upper 
portions of the bay had acquired, mainly through the 
agency of the streamlet, a continuous covering of ice, that 
had attained, round the base of the stone, which it clasped 
fast, a thickness of eighteen inches. On the night of the 
19th the tide rose unusually high on the beach, and there 
broke out a violent hurricane from the east-south-east, ac- 
companied by a snow-storm. There is a meal mill in the 
immediate neighborhood of the stone ; and when the old 
miller — as he related the story to the late Sir Thomas Dick 
Lauder — got up on the morning of the 20th, so violent 
was the storm, and so huge the snow-wreaths that blocked 
up every window and door, and rose over the eaves, that he 
could hardly make his way to his barns, — a journey of but 
a few yards ; and in returning again from them to his dwell- 
ing, he narrowly escaped losing himself in the drift. In 
looking towards the bay, in one of the pauses of the storm, 
he could scarce credit his eyesight : the immense Clach clu 
n-Aban had disappeared, — vanished, — gone clean off the 
ground ; and he called to his wife in astonishment and 
alarm, that the "meikle stane was awa," The honest 
woman looked out, and then rubbed her eyes, as if to verify 
their evidence ; but the fact was unquestionable, — the 
" meikle stane " certainly " was awa ; " and there remained 
but a hollow pit in the sand, with a long, shallow furrow, 
stretching from the pit outwards to where the snow rhime 
closed thick over the sea, to mark where it had been. 
When, however, the weather cleared up, the stone again 
became visible, lying out in the sands uncovered by the ebb, 
seven hundred and eighty feet from its former position. In 
the evening of the day, the neighbors nocked out by 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 113 

scores to examine the scene of so extraordinary a prodigy. 
Where the stone had lain they found but the deep dent 
connected by the furrow which lay athwart the bay in the 
line of the hurricane, with the stone itself, around the base 
of which there still projected a thick cornice of ice. In its 
new position the stone still lies ; and only a few years ago 
— mayhap, still — a wooden post which marked the point 
where the two contiguous properties met, marked also the 
spot from which, after a rest of ages, it had set out on its 
short voyage. 

My other case of boulder travelling — in some respects 
a more curious case than the one related — occurred early 
in the present century on the eastern coast of Sutherland- 
shire. Near the small hamlet of Torribal, in the upper part 
of Loch Fleet, there stood, about fifty years ago, a rude 
obelisk of undressed stone, generally regarded as Danish, 
which, though more ancient than authentic history, or even 
tradition, in the district, was less so than the old coast line, 
as it had been evidently erected, subsequent to the last 
change of level, on the flat marginal strip which intervenes 
between the old line and the sea. It rose in the middle of 
a swampy hollow, which protracted rains sometimes con- 
verted into a strip of water, and which was sometimes 
swept by the overflowings of the neighboring river. On 
the eve of the incident which proved the terminating one 
in its history, the hollow, previously filled with rain-water, 
had been frozen to the bottom by a continued frost, which 
was, however, on the eve of breaking up ; and a dense fog 
lay thick in the valley, when a benighted Highlander, re- 
turning tipsy from a market by the light of the moon, came 
staggering in the direction of the standing stone, and in a 
drunken frolic set his bonnet on the top of it ; and then 
wandering off into the mist, he lost sight of both stone and 

10* 



114 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

bonnet, and, failing to regain them, he had to return bare- 
headed to his home. The thaw came on ; the river rose 
over its banks ; the ice-cake around the obelisk floated high 
above the level, wreuching up the obelisk along with it, as 
the ice of the St. Lawrence wrenched up the stakes de- 
scribed by Sir Charles Lyell ; and both ice-cake and obelisk 
floated down the loch to the sea. As the morning broke — a 
fierce morning of flood and tempest — they were seen pass- 
ing what some forty years ago was known as the Little 
Ferry ; and the alarm went abroad along the shores on both 
sides, that there was a man standing in the middle of the 
Loch on the floating ice, and in course of being swept out 
to the ocean. Poor man ! he had been crossing the river, 
it was inferred, when the ice broke up ; and though the en- 
terprise was a somewhat perilous one, for the ice fragments 
were rushing furiously along on the wild tides of the loch, 
maddened by the inundation, a boat, double manned, shot 
out from the shore to the rescue, and soon neared the drift- 
ing ice-floe. It was ultimately seen, however, that the 
supposed man was but a Danish obelisk, bearing on its head 
a mysterious bonnet ; and bonnet and obelisk were left to 
find their way to the German Ocean, in which it is proba- 
ble they now both lie. These modern instances of boulder 
travelling may serve to show how huge stones originally 
associated with the boulder-clay may have come to rest 
on the arenaceous or gravelly deposits which overlie it. 
Through the second voyage of the Petty boulder, it was 
deposited on a recently formed bed of sand ; and the stand- 
ing-stone of Torribal may now rest on sea-shells that were 
living half a century ago. 

It is held by geologists of high standing, that after the 
period of submergence represented by the boulder-clays of 
our country, the British islands were elevated to such a 



LECTURES Otf GEOLOGY. 115 

height over the sea-level, that their distinctive character as 
islands was lost, and the area which they occupy united to 
the main land in the character of a western prolongation 
of the great European continent. It was at this period, 
says Professor Edward Forbes, that Britain and Ireland 
received, over the upraised bed of the German Ocean v their 
Germanic flora, — the last acquired of the five floras which 
compose their vegetation. The evidence on the point, 
however, still seems somewhat meagre. I can have no 
doubt that the land stood considerably higher during this 
Post-Tertiary period than it does now. As shown by the 
dressed surfaces and rounded forms of many of the smaller 
islets of the north-western coasts of Scotland, and the 
markings at the bottom of its lochs and estuaries, and on 
the rocks along their shores, the latter glaciers must have 
descended from the central hills of the country far below 
the present sea-level ; and we find some of the transverse 
moraines which they ploughed up before them in their 
descent existing as gravelly spits, that rise amid the waves, 
in the middle of long friths or at the entrance of deep bays. 
I have seen, too, on rocky coasts, considerably below the 
tide-line at flood, a sort of recent breccia formed by cal- 
careous springs, which, as the stalagmitical matter could 
not have been deposited in places exposed to the diurnal 
washings of the sea, indicated a higher level of the land 
than now, at the time of its formation ; and the submerged 
mosses of both Britain and Ireland — mosses now existing 
in many localities far below the fall of the tide — bear evi- 
dence, where not more ancient than the boulder-clay, in the 
same line. But on this obscure passage in the geological 
history of our country I am unable, from at least actual 
observation, to say aught more : my few facts lie in the 
direction of Professor Forbes's theory, but they accompany 



116 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

it only a short way. There is a wide gap still unfilled. I 
may be permitted, to remind you, that it is held by the 
Professor — one of the most accomplished of our geolo- 
gists — that of the five British floras, we have two in 
Scotland, — the Germanic flora, and the semi-arctic or 
Scandinavian flora; that these were introduced into the 
country at different periods ; and that while the Germanic 
flora dates from the times of the Post-Tertiary elevation 
of the land, the more ancient of the two — the semi-arctic 
or Scandinavian — dates from the preceding times of the 
boulder-clay. Nor does it appear in any degree more im- 
probable that we should have the descendants of the plants 
of even the remoter period still vital on our hill-tops, than 
that we should have the descendants of some of its animals 
still living in our seas. It seems at first a curious problem, 
difficult of solution, that widely separated mountain sum- 
mits should possess the same alpine plants, — that the sum- 
mits of Ben Wyvis and Ben Lomond, for instance, or of 
Ben Nevis and Ben Muich Dhui, should have their species 
in common, while not a trace of them appears on the lower 
elevations between. But it simplifies the case to conceive 
of these alpine plants as the vegetable aborigines of the 
country, compelled by climatal invasion to shelter in its 
last bleak retreats, where the winter snows linger unwasted 
till midsummer, and the breeze is always laden with the 
chills of the old glacial period. They compose the Celtic 
portion of the Scottish flora, cooped up in their mountain 
recesses by the encroachments of those Germanic races 
of the plant family that flourish, in the altered atmos- 
phere, or the more genial plains of the country, or on the 
sunny slopes of its lower hills. That language of flowers 
in which the ladies of Mohammedan countries have learned 
to converse is not unappropriated employed in giving 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 117 

expression to the various modes of a passion scarce less 
evanescent than the flowers themselves. But is it not 
passing strange, that we of Scotland should be called on 
to recognize in the transitory flowers of our sheltered 
low-lying plains and valleys, and of our high, bleak moors 
and exposed mountain summits, the records of an antiq- 
uity so remote, that the stories told by the half-effaced 
hieroglyphics of Nineveh and of Egypt are of yesterday in 
comparison ? 

Here the exhibition of our facts illustrative of the Pleis- 
tocene and Post-Tertiary periods in Scotland properly 
ends. The existing evidence has been taken, though, of 
course, briefly and imperfectly, the extent and multiplicity 
of the subject considered ; and, the record closed, a formal 
summary of the conclusions founded upon it should now 
terminate our history. Permit me, however, to present 
you, in conclusion, not with the formal summary, but a 
somewhat extended picture, of the whole, exhibited, pan- 
orama-like, as a series of scenes. The fine passage in the 
Autumn of Thomson, in which the poet lays all Scotland 
at once upon the canvas, and surveys it at a glance, must 
be familiar to you all : 

" Here awhile the Muse, 
High hovering o'er the broad cerulean scene, 
Sees Caledonia in romantic view; 
Her airy mountains, from the waving main, 
Invested with a keen diffusive sky, 
Breathing the soul acute; her forests huge, 
Incult, robust, and tall, by Nature's hand 
Planted of old; her azure lakes between, 
Poured out extensive, and of watery wealth 
Full; winding deep and green, her fertile vales, 
With many a cool, translucent, brimming flood 
Wash'd lovely, from the Tweed (pure parent stream, 
Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed, 



118 LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 

With, sylvan Jed, thy tributary brook), 

To where the North's inflated tempest foams 

O'er Orcas or Betubium's highest peak." 

Let us in like manner attempt calling up the features of 
our country in one continuous landscape, as they appeared 
at the commencement of the glacial period, just as the 
paroxysm of depression had come on, and bold headland 
and steep iron-bound islet had begun slowly to settle into 
the sea. 

The general outline is that of Scotland, though harsher 
and more rugged than now, for it lacks the softening in- 
tegument of the subsoils. Yonder are the Grampians, and 
yonder the Cheviots, and, deeply indenting the shores, yon- 
der are the well-known estuaries and bays, — the friths of 
Forth, Tay, and Moray, and the long withdrawing lakes, 
Loch Katrine, and Loch Awe, and Loch Maree, and the 
far-gleaming waters of the deep Caledonian Valley, the 
Ness, and the Oich, and the Lochy. But though the sum- 
mer sun looks down upon the scene, the snow-line de- 
scends beneath the top of even our second-class mountains ; 
and the tall, beetling Ben Nevis, and graceful Ben Lomond, 
and the broad-based Ben Muich Dhui, glitter in the sun- 
shine, in their coats of dazzling white, from their summits 
half-way down to their bases. There are extended forests 
of the native fir on the lower plains, mingled with the slim- 
mer forms and more richly-tinted foliage of the spruce 
pine. On the upper grounds, thickets of stunted willows 
and straggling belts of diminutive birches skirt the ravines 
and water-courses, and yellow mosses and gray lichens 
form the staple covering of the humbler hill-sides and the 
moors. But the distinctive feature of the country is its 
glaciers. Fed by the perpetual snows of the upper heights, 
the deeper valleys among the mountains have their rigid 



LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 119 

ice-rivers, that in the narrower friths and lochs of the 
western and northern coasts shoot far out, mole-like, into 
the tide. And, lo ! along the shores, in sounds and bays 
never yet ploughed by the keel of voyager, vast groups 
of icebergs, that gleam white to the sun, like the sails of 
distant fleets, lie moveless in the calm, or drift slowly along 
in rippling tideways. Nor is the land without its inhabi- 
tants, though man has not yet appeared. The colossal 
elephant, not naked and dingy of coat, like his congener of 
the tropics, but shaggy, with long red hair, browses among 
the woods. There is a strong-limbed rhinoceros wallow- 
ing in yonder swamp, and a herd of reindeer cropping the 
moss high on the hill-side beyond. The morse is basking 
on that half-tide skerry; and a wolf, swept seawards by 
the current, howls loud in terror from yonder drifting ice- 
floe. We have looked abroad on our future country in the 
period of the first local glaciers, ere the submergence of 
the land. 

Ages pass, and usher in the succeeding period of the 
boulder-clay. The prospect, no longer that of a continu- 
ous land, presents us with a wintry archipelago of islands, 
broken into three groups by two deep ocean-sounds, — ■ 
the ocean-sound of the great Caledonian Valley, and that 
of the broader but shallower valley which stretches across 
the island from the Clyde to the Forth. We stand full in 
front of one of these vast ocean-rivers, — the southern one. 
There are snow-enwrapped islets on either side. Can yon- 
der thickly-set cluster be the half-submerged Pentlands? 
and yonder pair of islets, connected by a low, flat neck, the 
eastern and western Lomonds ? and yonder half-tide rock, 
blackened with algae, and around which a shoal of porpoises 
are gamboling, the summit of Arthur Seat ? The wide 
sound, now a rich agricultural valley, is here studded by 



120 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

its fleets of tall icebergs, — there cumbered by its level 
fields of drift ice. Nature sports wantonly amid every 
variety of form ; and the motion of the great floating 
masses, cast into shapes with which we associate moveless 
solidity, adds to the magical effect of the scene. Here a 
flat-roofed temple, surrounded by colonnades of hoar and 
wasted columns, comes drifting past ; there a cathedral, 
furnished with towers and spire, strikes heavily against the 
rocky bottom, many fathoms beneath, and its nodding pin- 
nacles stoop at every blow. Yonder, already fast aground, 
there rests a ponderous castle, with its curtained towers, 
its arched gateway, and its multitudinous turrets, reflected 
on the calm surface beneath ; and pyramids and obelisks, 
buttressed ramparts, and embrazured watch-towers, with 
shapes still more fantastic, — those of ships, and trees, and 
brute and human forms, — crowd the retiring vista beyond. 
There is a scarce less marked variety of color. The in- 
tense white of the field-ice, thinly covered with snow, and 
glittering without shade in the declining sun, dazzles the 
eye. The taller icebergs gleam in hues of more softened 
radiance, — here of an emerald green, there of a sapphire 
blue, yonder of a paly marble gray ; the light, polarized 
by a thousand cross reflections, sports amid the planes and 
facets, the fissures and pinnacles, in all the rainbow gor- 
geousness of the prismatic hues. And bright over all rise 
on the distant horizon the detached mountain-tops, now 
catching a flush of crimson and gold from the setting lumi- 
nary. But the sun sinks, and the clouds gather, and the 
night comes on black with tempest ; and the grounded 
masses, moved by the violence of the aroused winds, grate 
heavily along the bottom ; and while the whole heavens 
are foul with sleet and snow-rack, and the driving masses 
clash in rude collision, till all beneath is one wide stun- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 121 

ning roar, the tortured sea boils and dashes around them, 
turbid with the comminuted debris of the fretted rocks 
below. 

The vision belongs to an early age of the boulder-clay : 
it changes to a later time ; and the same sea spreads out 
as before, laden by what seem the same drifting ice-floes. 
But the lower hills, buried in the profound depths of ocean, 
are no longer visible; the Lammermuirs have disappeared; 
and the slopes of Braid and Duddingstone, with 

" North Berwick Law, with cone of green, 
And Bass amid the waters; " 

and we can determine their place by but the huger ice- 
bergs that lie stranded and motionless on their peaks ; 
while the lesser masses drift on to the east. Moons wax 
and wane, and tides rise and fall ; and still the deep cur- 
rent of the gulf stream flows ever from the west, traversing 
the wide Atlantic, like some vast river winding through 
an enormous extent of meadow ; and, in eddying over the 
submerged land, it arranges behind the buried eminences, 
in its own easterly line, many a long trail of gravel and 
debris, to form the Crag and Tail phenomenon of future ge- 
ologists. As we extend our view, we may mark, far in the 
west, where the arctic current, dotted white with its ice- 
mountains and floes, impinges on the gulf stream ; and 
where, sinking from its chill density to a lower stratum 
of sea, it gives up its burden to the lighter and more tepid 
tide. A thick fog hangs over the junction, where the 
warmer waters of the west and south encounter the chill, 
icy air of the north ; and, steaming forth into the bleak at- 
mosphere like a seething cauldron, the cloud, when the west 
wind blows, fills with its thick gray reek the recesses of 
the half-foundered land, and obscures the prospect. 

11 



122 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

Anon there is another change in the dream. The long 
period of submergence is past; the country is again rising; 
and, under a climate still ungenial and severe, the glaciers 
lengthen out seawards, as the land broadens and extends, 
till the northern and western Highlands seem manacled in 
ice. Even the lower hill-tops exhibit an alpine vegetation, 
beautiful, though somewhat meagre; while in the friths 
and bays, the remote ancestors of many of our existing 
shells that thrive in the higher latitudes, still mix, as at an 
earlier period, with shells whose living representatives are 
now to be sought on the coasts of northern Scandinavia 
and Greenland. Ages pass ; the land rises slowly over the 
deep, terrace above terrace ; the thermal line moves grad- 
ually to the north ; the line of perpetual snow ascends be- 
yond the mountain summits; the temperature increases; the 
ice disappears; the semi-arctic plants creep up the hill-sides, 
to be supplanted on the plains by the leafy denizens of 
happier climates ; and at length, under skies such as now 
look down upon us, and on nearly the existing breadth of 
land, the human period begins. The half-naked hunter, 
armed with his hatchet or lance of stone, pursues the roe 
or the wild ox through woods that, though comparatively 
but of yesterday, already present appearances of a hoar 
antiquity ; or, when the winter snows gather around his 
dwelling, does battle at its beleaguered threshold with the 
hungry wolf or the bear. The last great geologic change 
takes place : the coast line is suddenly elevated ; and the 
country presents a new front to the sea. And on the 
widened platform, when yet other ages have come and 
gone, the historic period commences, and the light of a 
classical literature falls for the first time on the incidents 
of Scottish story, and on the bold features of Scottish 
character. 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 123 

It is said that modern science is adverse to the exercise 
and development of the imaginative faculty. But is it 
really so ? Are visions such as those in which we have 
been indulging less richly charged with that poetic pabu- 
lum on which fancy feeds and grows strong, than those 
ancient tales of enchantment and faery which beguiled of 
old, in solitary homesteads, the long winter nights ? Be- 
cause science flourishes, must poesy decline ? The com- 
plaint serves but to betray the weakness of the class who 
urge it. True, in an age like the present, — considerably 
more scientific then poetical, — science substitutes for the 
smaller poetry of fiction, the great poetry of truth ; and 
as there is a more general interest felt in new revelations 
of what God has wrought, than in exhibitions of what the 
humbler order of poets have half borrowed, half invented, 
the disappointed dreamers complain that the "material 
laws " of science have pushed them from their place. As 
well might the Arab who prided himself upon the beauty 
of some white tent which he had reared in some green 
oasis of the desert, complain of the dull tools of Belzoni's 
laborers, when engaged in clearing from the sands the 
front of some august temple of the ancient time. It is 
not the tools, it might be well said to the complainer, that 
are competing with your neat little tent ; it is the sublime 
edifice, hitherto covered up, which the tools are laying 
bare. Nor is it the material laws, we may, on the same 
principle, say to the poets of the querulous cast, that are 
overbearing your little inventions, and making them seem 
small ; but those sublime works and wonderful actings of 
the Creator which they unveil, and bring into comparison 
with yours. But from His works and His actings have the 
masters of the lyre ever derived their choicest materials ; 
and whenever a truly great poet arises, — one that will 



124 LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 

add a profound intellect to a powerful imagination, — he 
will find science not his enemy, but an obsequious caterer 
and a devoted friend. He will find sermons in stones, and 
more of the suggestive and the sublime in a few broken 
scaurs of clay, a few fragmentary shells, and a few greea 
reaches of the old coast line, than versifiers of the ordinary 
calibre in their once fresh gems and flowers, — in sublime 
ocean, the broad earth, or the blue firmament and all its 
stars. 



LECTURE THIRD. 

The Poet Delta (Dr. Moir) — His Definition of Poetry — His Death — His Buriu.- 
place at Inveresk — Vision, Geological and Historical, of the Surrounding 
Country — What is it that imparts to Nature its Poetry — The Tertiary Forma- 
tion in Scotland — In Geologic History all Ages contemporary — Amber the 
Resin of the Pinus succinifer — A Vegetable Production of the Middle Tertiary 
Ages — Its Properties and Uses — The Masses of Insects inclosed in it — The 
Structural Geology of Scotland — Its Trap Rock — The Scenery usually asso- 
ciated with the Trap Rock — How formed — The Cretaceous Period in Scotland 
— Its Productions — The Chalk Deposits — Death of Species dependent on Laws 
different from those which determine the Death of Individuals — The Two 
great Infinites. 

The members of the Philosophical Institution of Edin- 
burgh enjoyed the privilege last season of listening to one 
of the sweetest and tenderest of modern British poets 
eloquently descanting on the history of modern British 
poetry. Rarely had master established for himself a bet- 
ter claim to teach. And, regarding the elegant volume 
produced on that occasion, so exquisite in its taste and so 
generous in its criticisms, it may justly be said that perhaps 
its only, at all events its gravest defect, is the inevitable 
one that, in exhibiting all that during the bypast genera- 
tion was most characteristic and best in the poesy of our 
country, it should have taken no cognizance of the poetry 
of Delta. Dr. Moir had just finished his course, but his 
volume had not yet appeared, when, urged by a friend, I 
perhaps too rashly consented to contribute two lectures to 
a course then delivering in the native town of the poet; 
and in one of these I expressed the conviction to which I 

11* 



126 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

gave utterance last season in this place, that there is no 
incompatibility between the pursuit of geologic science 
and a genial development of the poetic faculty. Dr. Moir 
had honored my address with his presence ; he had listened 
with apparent attention to a view very much opposed, as 
I was told after the breaking up of the meeting, to one 
which he himself had promulgated to the Institution only 
a few weeks before ; and on the publication of his little 
volume, he politely sent me a copy, accompanied by a kind 
note, in which he referred to the point apparently at issue 
between us as involving rather a seeming than a real dif- 
ference. " Our antagonism respecting the relations of 
poetry and science," he said, "is, I doubt not, much more 
apparent than real, and arises simply from the opposite 
aspects in which we have regarded the subject." I read 
his work with interest; and at first deemed the differ- 
ence somewhat more than merely apparent. I found 
the lecturer speaking of " staggering blows " inflicted on 
the poetry of the age by science in not a few formidably 
prosaic shapes, — in the shape, among the rest, of "geolog- 
ical exposition ; " and of " rocks stratified by the geologists 
as satins are measured by mercers," and, in consequence, 
no longer redolent of that emotion of the sublime which 
was wont to breathe forth of old from broken crags and 
giddy precipices. But his definition of poetry reassured 
me, and set all right again. "Poetry," he said, "may be 
defined to be objects or subjects seen through the mirror 
of imagination, and descanted on in harmonious language; 
and if so, it must be admitted that the very exactness of 
knowledge is a barrier to the laying on of that coloring by 
which facts can be invested with the illusive hues of poetry. 
Wherever light penetrates the obscure and illuminates the 
uncertain, we may rest assured that a demesne has been 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 127 

lost to the realms of imagination." Now, if such be poe- 
try, I said, and such the conditions favorable to its devel- 
opment, the poets need be in no degree jealous of the 
geologists. The stony science, with buried creations for 
its domains, and half an eternity charged with its annals, 
possesses its realms of dim and shadowy fields, in which 
troops of fancies already walk like disembodied ghosts in 
the old fields of Elysium, and which bid fair to be quite 
dark and uncertain enough for all the purposes of poesy 
for centuries to come. 

Alas ! only a few weeks after, amid hundreds of his sor- 
rowing friends and townsmen, I followed the honored re- 
mains of the poet to the grave; and heard, in that old, 
picturesque burying-ground which commands on its green 
ridge the effluence of the Esk, the shovelled earth falling 
heavy on the coffin-lid. It was a lovely day of chequered 
shadow and sunshine ; and the wide frith slept silently in 
the calm, with a dream-like spectrum of the heavens mir- 
rored on its bosom. From the sadness of the present my 
thoughts let themselves out upon the past. I stood among 
the groves on a grassy mound which had been reared by 
the old Roman invader greatly more than a thousand years 
before ; and I bethought me how, on visiting the place a 
few twelvemonths previous, for the first time, I had first 
of all sought out the burying-ground of the family of the 
deceased, — a spot endeared to every lover of poesy by 
those tenderest and sweetest of " domestic verses " which 
show how truly, according to Cowper, " the poet's lyre " 
had been " the poet's heart ; " and how I had next set my- 
self to trace, as next in interest, the remains of that stern 
old people whose thirst of conquest and dominion had 
led them so far. And lo ! like a dream remembered in a 
dream, as the crowd broke up and retired, the visions of 



128 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

that quiet day were again conjured up before me, but bear- 
ing now a felt reference to the respected dead, and accom- 
panied by the conviction that, had we been destined to 
meet, and to compare at length our respective views, we 
should have found them essentially the same. 

On that rising ground, so rich in historic associations, 
both Somerset and Cromwell had planted their cannon, 
and it had witnessed the disaster at Pinkie, and the head- 
long flight of the dragoons of Cope. But, passing over 
the more recent scenes, the vision of a forest-covered coun- 
try rose before me, — a vision of the ancient aboriginal 
woods rising dusky and brown in one vast thicket, from 
the windings of the Esk to the pale brow of the Pent- 
lands. Nor was the landscape without its human figures. 
The grim legionaries of the Proconsul of Augustus were 
opening with busy axes a shady roadway through the 
midst; and the incessant strokes of the axe and the crash 
of falling trees echoed in the silence throughout the valley. 
And then there arose another and earlier vision, when the 
range of semicircular heights which rise above the ancient 
Saxon borough, with its squat tower and antique bridge, 
existed as the coast line, and the site of the town itself as 
a sandy bay, swum over by the sea-wolf and the seal ; and 
the long ridge now occupied by garden and villa, church 
and burying-ground, as a steep, gravelly bar, heaped up in 
the vexed line, where the tides of the river on the one 
hand contended with the waves of the Frith on the other; 
and the Esk, fed by the glaciers of the interior, whose blue 
gleam I could mark on the distant Lammermoors and the 
steeper Pentlands, rolled downwards, a vast stream, that 
filled from side to side the ample banks which, even when 
heaviest in flood, it scarce half fills now ; while a scantier 
and dingier foliage than before, composed chiefly of taper 



LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 129 

spruce and dark pine, roughened the lower plains, and 
flung its multitudinous boughs athwart the turbid and 
troubled eddies. And then there arose yet other and 
remoter scenes. From a foreground of weltering sea I 
could mark a scattered archipelago of waste, uninhabited 
islands, picturesquely roughened by wood and rock; and 
near where the Scottish capital now stands, a submarine 
volcano sent forth its slim column of mingled smoke and 
vapor into the sky. And then there rose in quick succes- 
sion scenes of the old Carboniferous forests : long with- 
drawing lakes, fringed with dense thickets of the green 
Calamite, tall and straight as the masts of pinnaces, and 
inhabited by enormous fishes, that glittered through the 
transparent depths in their enamel-led armor of proof; or 
glades of thickest verdure, where the tree-fern mingled 
its branch-like fronds with the hirsute arms of the gigan- 
tic club-moss, and where, amid strange forms of shrub and 
tree no longer known on earth, the stately Araucarian 
reared its proud head two hundred feet over the soil ; or 
yet again, there rose a scene of coral bowers and encrinal 
thickets, that glimmered amid the deep green of the an- 
cient ocean, and in which, as in the groves sung by Ovid, 
the plants were sentient, and the shrinking flowers bled 
when injured. And, last of all, on the further limits of 
organic life a thick fog came down upon the sea, and my 
excursions into the remote past terminated, like the voy- 
age of an old fabulous navigator, in thick darkness. Each 
of the series of visions, whether of the comparatively re- 
cent or the remote past, in which I at that time indulged, 
had employed the same faculties and gratified the same 
feelings ; and though, in surveying the stuff out of which 
they had been sublimed, I could easily say where the his- 
toric ended and the geologic began, no corresponding line 



130 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

indicated in the visions themselves where the poetry ended 
and the prose began. The visions, whether historic or 
geologic, " were of imagination all compact." They all 
involved the same processes of ?ni?id — though, of course, 
in this instance mind of a humbler order and ruder tex- 
ture — as those exhibited in the sweet and fragrant verse 
of the poet himself, — as those exercised, let me say, in his 
vision on " Mary's Mount," when, with quiet graves above, 
and surrounded by quiet fields, he saw the contending 
hosts of a former day thronging the lower ground, and, 

" With hilt to hilt, and hand to hand, 
The children of our mother land 
To battle came ; " 

or when he called up, after the lapse of half a lifetime, 
how when, in a wintry morning, he had journeyed before 
daybreak, a happy boy, along the frozen Esk, and saw 

" In the far west the Pentland's gloomy ridge 
Belting the pale blue sky, whereon a cloud, 
Fantastic, gray, and tinged with solemn light, 
Lay like a dreaming monster, and the moon, 
Waning, above its silvery rim upheld 
Her horns, as 't were a spectre of the past." 

I shall continue to hold, therefore, that there was no real 
difference between the views of the poet and those which 
I myself entertain, but that, as he himself well expressed 
it, our " apparent antagonism arose simply from the oppo- 
site aspects in which we had viewed the subject." He had 
been thinking of but stiff diagrams and hard names, — of 
dead strata measured off, in "geological exposition," by 
the yard and the mile, and enveloped in the obscuring 
folds of a Babylonish phraseology; while I, looking through 
the crooked characters and uncouth sounds in which the 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 131 

meanings of the science are locked up, to the meanings 
themselves, was luxuriating among the strange, wild narra- 
tives and richly poetic descriptions of which its pregnant 
records consist. 

What is it, let me ask, that imparts to Nature its poe- 
try? It is not in Nature itself; it resides not either in 
dead or organized matter, — in rock, or bird, or flower; 
" the deep saith it is not in me, and the sea saith it is not 
in me." It is in mind that it lives and breathes : external 
nature is but its storehouse of subjects and models; and it 
is not until these are called up as images, and invested with 
" the light that never was on land or sea," that they cease 
to be of the earth earthy, and form the ethereal stuff of 
which the visions of the j>oet are made. Nay, is it not 
mainly through that associative faculty to which the sights 
and sounds of present nature become suggestive of the 
images of a nature not present, but seen within the mind, 
that the landscape pleases, or that we find beauty in its 
woods or beside its streams, or the impressive and the sub- 
lime among its mountains and rocks? Nature is a vast tab- 
let, inscribed with signs, each of which has its own signifi- 
cancy, and becomes poetry in the mind when read ; and 
geology is simply the key by which myriads of these signs, 
hitherto undecipherable, can be unlocked and perused, and 
thus a new province added to the poetical domain. We 
are told by travellers, that the rocks of the wilderness of 
Sinai are lettered over with strange characters, inscribed 
during the forty years' wanderings of Israel. They testify, 
in their very existence, of a remote past, when the cloud- 
o'ershadowed tabernacle rose amid the tents of the desert; 
and who shall dare say whether to the scholar who could 
dive into their hidden meanings they might not be found 
charged with the very songs sung of old by Moses and by 



132 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

Miriam, when the sea rolled over the pride of Egypt ? To 
the geologist every rock bears its inscription engraved in 
ancient hieroglyphic characters, that tell of the Creator's 
jonrneyings of old, of the laws which He gave, the tab- 
ernacles which lie reared, and the marvels which He 
wrought, — of mute prophecies wrapped up in type and 
symbol, — of earth gulfs that opened, and of reptiles that 
flew, — of fiery plagues that devastated on the dry hind, 
and of hosts more numerous than that of Pharaoh, that 
" sank like lead in the mighty waters ; " and, having in 
some degree mastered the occult meanings of these strange 
hieroglyphics, we must be permitted to refer, in asserting 
the poetry of our science, to the sublime revelations with 
which they are charged, and the vivid imagery which they 
conjure up. But our history lags in its progress, while 
we discuss the poetic capabilities of the study through 
which its records are read and its materials derived. 

In the deposits of that Tertiary division of the geologic 
formation which represents in the history of the globe the 
period during which mammals began to be abundant, and 
in which the great Cuvier won his laurels, Scotland is one 
of the poorest of European countries. Save for the com- 
paratively recent discovery of Tertiary beds in the island 
of Mull by a nobleman fitted by nature either to adorn 
the literature or extend the science of his country, the 
geological historian would have to pass direct from the 
Pleistocene beds, with their grooved and polished pebbles 
and their semi-arctic shells, to the Chalk fossils of Banff and 
Aberdeen. But the discovery of his Grace the Duke of 
Argyll furnishes us with an interesting glimpse of a middle 
period widely different in its character from either the 
Cretaceous system or the boulder-clay. In the island of 
Mull, in a headland that rises about one hundred and thirty 



LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 133 

feet over the sea, there occur, interposed between thick 
beds of trap, three comparatively thin beds of a gray are- 
naceous shale, charged with fossil leaves, as beautifully 
spread out, and with their ribs and veins as distinctly vis- 
ible, as if they had been preserved in the herbarium of a 
botanist. Most of them belong to extinct species of exist- 
ing families of dicotyledonous trees, such as the plane and 
the buckthorn, mingled, however, with narrow linear leaves 
of cone-bearing trees, which are supposed to belong, in 
this instance, to a species of yew, and with what seem the 
fronds of fern and the stems of equisetacea. Some of the 
beds of coal which have been long known to occur among 
the traps of the island of Mull are regarded by the Duke 
of Argyll as prolongations of these Tertiary leaf-beds, so 
mineralized by some metamorphic action as to have lost 
the organic structure. There must have been vast accu- 
mulations of leaves ere they could have yielded beds of 
coal. The middle or second bed of the three his Grace 
describes as peculiarly rich in the leafy impressions of this 
ancient period ; and I need scarce say how suggestive the 
glimpse is which is furnished us by these buried layers 
of the foliage of Tertiary forests in Scotland, of which no 
other known memorial remains. You all remember Cole- 
ridge's fine comparison of the sorely-worn sails of the 
vessel in which the ancient mariner performed his voyage 
of peril and prodigy, to 

" Brown skeletons of leaves that lay 
The forest brook along, 
When the ivy tod is heavy with snow, 
And the owlet whoops to the wolf below; " 

and you must have often marked the extreme delicacy of 
those deposited leaves, macerated during the winter sea- 

12 



134 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

son at the bottom of some woodland pool, which sug- 
gested the poet's simile. In that Tertiary period to which 
the leaf-beds of Mull belong, it would seem that extensive 
forests, chiefly of deciduous trees, shed year after year 
their summer coverings of leaves, some of which fell, and 
some of which were blown by the autumnal gusts, into the 
streams of the country, and were swept down by the cur- 
rent to lakes or estuaries, where they lay gradually resolv- 
ing into such brown skeletons as caught the eye of Cole- 
ridge. We learn further, that there were forces active at 
the time, of which at any later period we have had no 
examples in the British islands. One of the leaf-beds 
described by his Grace is overlaid by a bed of volcanic 
ashes or tuff seven feet thick; another by a bed of similar 
ashes mixed with chalk flints, twenty feet thick ; and yet 
another — the topmost layer — bears over it a bed of over- 
flowing columnar basalt, forty feet thick. The volcanic 
agencies were active in what is now Scotland during the 
ages of its Tertiary forests. 

The only Tertiary fossils of Scotland yet discovered are 
these forest and fern leaves of the Mull deposits. Their 
place in the great geologic division to which they belong 
is still definitely to fix ; but some of our higher geologists 
are, I find, disposed to refer them to the second Tertiary 
or Miocene epoch, though with considerable hesitation. 
They belong, it is probable, to a period not very widely 
removed from that of the richly fossiliferous Marlstone of 
GEningen, on the banks of the Rhine, with its vast abun- 
dance of plants, chiefly dicotyledonous, — of fishes specifi- 
cally different from those which now exist, but of the 
existing genera, — of a fox, which only the comparative 
anatomist can distinguish from the recent species of this 
country, — and of reptiles generically akin to those of 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 135 

the United States. It is a curious fact that, both in its 
animal and vegetable productions, that part of the New 
World which borders upon the Atlantic in the temperate 
zone, from Carolina to the mouth of the St. Lawrence, still 
presents very much the appearance which was presented 
by the flora and fauna of Europe during the later Tertiary 
periods. It has been often remarked, in reference to 
human manners and the progress of civilization, that all 
ages of the world may be regarded as contemporary. 
Man is still in many of the South Sea Islands what he was 
in our own country previous to the times of the Roman 
invasion ; and there are provinces in Spain and Portugal 
in which neither the people nor the clergy have got be- 
yond the semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages. Curiously 
enough, in geologic history also, though in a narrower and 
more restricted sense, all ages are contemporary. The 
Galapagos have their age of reptiles, New Zealand its 
age of birds, and New Holland its age of marsupial quad- 
rupeds. These countries bear now, in not a few par- 
ticulars, the character of the Oolitic period in our own 
country. Again, on the eastern coasts of' North America 
we are presented with a vegetation greatly resembling that 
of some of the later Tertiary periods ; and of several of 
its animals the type is still more ancient. America, though 
emphatically the New World in relation to its discovery 
by civilized man, is, at least in these regions, an old world 
in relation to geological type ; and it is the so-called Old 
World that is in reality the new one. "If we compare," 
says Professor Agassiz, in his late admirable work, " Lake 
Superior," — "if we compare a list of the fossil trees and 
shrubs from the Tertiary beds of CEningen with a cata- 
logue of the trees and shrubs of Europe and North Amer- 
ica, it will be seen that the differences scarcely go beyond 



136 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

those shown by the different floras of these continents 
under the same latitudes. But what is quite extraordi- 
nary and unexpected is the fact, that the European fossil 
plants of that locality resemble more closely the trees and 
shrubs which grow at present in the eastern parts of North 
America, than those of any other part of the world ; thus 
allowing us to express correctly the difference between the 
opposite coasts of these continents, by saying that the 
present eastern American flora, and, I may add, the fauna 
also, have a more ancient character than those of Europe. 
The plants, especially the trees and shrubs growing in our 
days in the United States, are, as it were, old-fashioned ; 
and the characteristic genera Lagoings, Chelydra, and the 
large Salamanders, with permanent gills, that remind us 
of the fossils of (Eningen, are at least equally so ; they 
bear the marks of former ages" This interesting fact — 
vouched for by assuredly no mean authority — may enable 
us to conceive of the general aspect of our country, so far 
at least as its appearance depended on its vegetation, to- 
wards the close of the Miocene period. Old Scotland ex- 
hibited features in that age greatly resembling those pre- 
sented to the puritan fathers by the forest-covered shores 
of New England little more than two centuries ago. But 
no family of man dwelt in its solitary woods ; and, as 
shown by its widely spread deposits of trap-tuff, and its 
vast beds of overlying basalt, broken by faults and shifts, 
its ancient volcanoes had not yet died out, and it must 
have had its frequent earthquake agues and shaking fits. 

There is, however, another witness besides the leaf-beds 
of the island of Mull, which we may properly call into court 
to give evidence regarding the Tertiary period in Scotland. 
It is known that from a very early time masses of amber 
have been occasionally furnished by the north-eastern 



LECTURES ON" GEOLOGY. 137 

shores of the kingdom, in especial by that extensive tract 
of- coast which stretches from the Buchan-ness to the 
Frith of Tay ; and the geologist now recognizes amber 
as a vegetable production of the Middle Tertiary ages. 
It is the resin of an extinct pine, which the fossil botanist 
has only of late learned to term the JPinus succinifer, or 
amber pine, but which the Prussian peasantry, who gather 
amber on the southern shores of the Baltic, used for ages 
to associate with this substance, from its occurrence in a 
fossil state in the same beds as amber iooocL The orna- 
mental character of this precious resin seems to have been 
appreciated by the native Scotch at an early period : beads 
of amber have been found in the old sepulchral barrows 
of the kingdom. Its value, however, as we learn from the 
first notice of it which occurs in our written history, — 
that of Hector Boece, — lias not been always appreciated. 
After describing it, not very inadequately, as " ane maner 
of goum or elect uar, he wit like gold, and sa attractive of 
iiatur, that it drawis stra, flax, or hemmes of claethis to it 
in the samen maner as does an adamant stone grow," he 
goes on to say, that " twa year afore the comin af [his] 
buke to licht (1524) thair arrivit an gret lompe of this 
goum in Buchquhane, als meikle as an hens ; and wes 
brocht hame by the herdes quhilk wer kepand thair bestis, 
to thair housis, and cassin in the fere. And becaus they 
fand an smell and odour thairwith, they scha to thair 
maister that it wes garand for the w?sens that is maid in 
the kirkes. Thair maister wes ane rud man as thay wer; 
and tuk bot ane litell part thairof, and left the remanent 
part behind him as mater of litell effect. All the parts of 
this goum, quhen it wes broken, wes of hew of gold, and 
schone lyke the licht of an candell. The maist part of 
this goum or electuar wes destroyit be rud peple afore "t 

12* 



188 - LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

cam to any wise mannis eirs ; of quhome may be verifyet 
the proverb, ' The sow cares not for balme.' Als sone as I 
wes aclvertisit thairof, I maid sic diligence that ane pafrt 
of it was brocht me at Aberdene." I may add to this 
notice of the old chronicler, that up to a comparatively 
recent period, ornaments of amber, especially amber beads 
of large size, or, as they were termed by our ancestors, 
"lamour beads," were highly valued by the humbler Scotch. 
That mysterious attractive property which resided in this 
gem-like resin, and which has since been found pregnant 
with that wonderful science to which the substance has 
given its Greek name, electrum, threw a halo of mystery 
around it, that served to enhance its native beauty. The 
Laird of Dumbieclikes was, it must be confessed, neither a 
very fervent nor very poetical lover ; but a lover he was ; 
and yet he could find nothing more apt with which to 
compare the eyes of his mistress, when turned upon him 
in her gratitude, than to beads of amber. " Dinna ye 
think," said the laird, "puir Jeanie's e'en, wi' the tears 
in them, glanced like lamour beads, Mr. Saddletree ? " 

To the geologist this precious gum of the Tertiary ages 
is fraught with a peculiar interest, from the circumstance 
that it forms the best of all matrices for the preservation 
of organisms of the more fragile kinds. Mosses, fungi, 
and liverworts, are plants of so delicate a structure, that 
they are rarely or never preserved in shale or stone ; but 
specimens of all three have been found locked up in 
amber in a state of the most perfect keeping. And, 
besides containing fragments of the pine which produced 
it, it has been found to contain minute pieces of four other 
species of pine, with bits of cypresses, yews, junipers, 
oaks, poplars, beeches, etc., — in all, forty-eight different 
species of shrubs and trees, which must have flourished in 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 139 

the forests where it grew, and which, " viewed in the 
group, may be regarded as constituting," says Professor 
Goppert, "a flora of North American character." You 
will of course remark how directly this evidence bears on 
that of Professor Agassiz. The most remarkable organ- 
isms of the amber are, however, its insects, — a kind of 
fossils suggestive of a very different poetry from that 
which Pope elaborated from them in his well-known 
simile : 

"Pretty in amber to observe the forms 
Of hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or -worms : 
The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare, 
But wonder how the mischief they got there! " 

Fossil insects occur in both the Secondary and Palaeozoic 
divisions, but rarely indeed in a state of sufficient entire- 
ness to enable the entomologist to distinguish their spe- 
cies. Even in classing them into families and genera, our 
best writers on the subject, such as the Rev. Mr. Brodie, 
confess that some of the number are very imperfectly 
made out. In the amber, on the contrary, even the most 
delicate ephemerae that ever sported for a single summer 
evening in a forest glade, and then perished as the night 
came on, are preserved in a state of perfect entireness. 
In the amber of Prussia eight hundred different kinds 
of insects have been determined, most of them belonging 
to species, and even genera, that appear to be distinct 
from any now known ; while of the others, some are 
nearly related to indigenous species, and some seem iden- 
tical with existing forms that inhabit the warmer climates 
of the south. From their great specific variety and 
abundance we may infer that insects then, as now, formed 
the most numerous division of the animal kingdom. Our 
entomologists reckon at the present time about eleven 



140 LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 

thousand species of recent British insects, — a number 
many times greater than that of all its other denizens 
of the animal kingdom united. You will scarce deem the 
riddle regarding the entombment of these fragile crea- 
tures in the amber, which so puzzled the poet, particularly 
a hard one : the process must have resembled that which 
we see going on in our pine-forests every summer. The 
little flutterers must have settled on the bleeding trunks 
of the Pimts succinifer, and stuck fast, and the after flow 
of the sap covered them over. They add an interesting 
feature, identical with that sung by the poet, to the odor- 
iferous amber forests of the Tertiary. The hot sun is 
riding high over the recesses of one of these deep woods, 
never yet trodden by human foot, and lighting up the 
waved lines of delicate green with which spring, just pass- 
ing into early summer, has befringed the dark pines, and 
the yet unwithered catkins of the poplar and plane, and 
the white blossoms of the buckthorn. The cave-bear and 
hyena repose in silence in their dens, and not a wandering 
breeze rustles among the young leafage. 

" But hark! how through the peopled air 

The busy murmur glows; 
The insect youth are on the wing, 
Eager to taste the honied spring, 
And float amid the liquid noon : 
Some lightly o'er the current skim, 
Some show their gaily gilded trim 

Quick glaring to the sun." 

And lo ! where the forest glade terminates in a brown, 
primeval wilderness, the sunbeams fall with dazzling 
brightness on the trunk of a tall, stately tree, just a little 
touched with decay ; and it reflects the light far and wide, 
and gleams in strong contrast with the gloom of the 



LECTURES ON" GEOLOGY. 1 11 

bosky recesses beyond, like the pillar of fire in the wilder- 
ness relieved against the cloud of night. 'T is a decaying 
pine of stateliest size, bleeding amber. The insects of the 
hour flutter around it ; and when, beguiled by the grate- 
ful perfume, they touch its deceitful surface, they fare as 
the lords of creation did in a long posterior age, in that 

" Serbonian bog, 
Betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old, 
Where armies whole have sunk." 

But, as happened to so many of the heroes of classic his- 
tory, death is fame here, and by dying they became im- 
mortal; for it is from the individuals who thus perish that 
future ages are yet to learn that the species which they 
represent ever existed, or to become acquainted with even 
the generic peculiarities by which they were distinguished. 
The question still remains, whence has the amber of 
our Scottish coasts been derived? It occurs in situ in 
Tertiary deposits in the neighborhood of London : good 
specimens of considerable size have been found, for in- 
stance, in a clay-pit near Hyde Park corner, not a quarter 
of a mile from the site of the Crystal Palace. It occurs 
too, in Prussia, in a clay-bed of considerable horizontal 
extent, of which the larger part lies under the waves of 
the Baltic, but which rises on some parts of the coast 
about forty feet over the level of that sea, and to which 
of late years a sort of classical interest has been given by 
a modern fiction, worthy, from its air of matter-of-fact 
truthfulness, of our own Defoe, — the "Amber Witch." 
The black amber vein found by the pastor's little daughter 
is described in the story as occurring high in a wooded 
defile behind her father's parsonage, and as owing its black 
color to the quantity of charcoal, i. e., carbonized wood, 



1-12 LECTURES ON" GEOLOGY. 

which it contained. And in both particulars the descrip- 
tion is true to the geology of the amber deposits. But 
we have no amber deposits in Scotland ; had amber ever 
existed in connection with the Tertiary beds of Mull, it 
would have shared, in all probability, from the close prox- 
imity of the trap, the fate of the great lumps of butter 
which that giant in the nursery story who used to eat 
knights and young ladies, employed in testing the heat of 
his oven ; and so we must look for its place, not on our 
shores, but in the seas by which they are washed. But it 
is here necessary that I should submit to you a brief out- 
line of the structural geology of our country, not only 
that we may know in what direction to look for its Ter- 
tiary beds, but in order also that we may form such an 
acquaintance with the general framework of our subject, 
as it exists in space, as may guide us in all our after con- 
ceptions regarding it. Avoiding the prolixity of minute 
detail, I shall present you at present with but a few of the 
leading lines. 

The great central nucleus of Scotland, presenting con- 
siderably more than fifteen thousand square miles of sur- 
face, consists of what we shall term, with the elder geol- 
ogists, primary rocks, — granites, gneisses, mica-schists, 
quartz-rocks, and clay-slates. These extend in one direc- 
tion from the southern base of the Grampians to the 
northern limits of Sutherlandshire, and from Peterhead 
and Aberdeen on the east to Glenelg and Loch Carron on 
the west. [Now, around this great primary mass there runs 
a ring of the sedimentary fossiliferous rocks, somewhat, 
though of course not with such unbroken regularity, as a 
frame runs round a picture, or as the metallic setting of a 
Cairngorm or pebble brooch surrounds the stone. Of 
these earlier fossiliferous rocks, known about the begin- 



LECTURES 02T GEOLOGY. 143 

ning of the present century as the Grauwacke, and now 
as the Silurians, the frame or ring contains but fragments, 
— a narrow strip along the flanks of the Grampians on the 
south, and a few detached patches along the shores of 
Banff on the north and east. But the ring or frame of 
the next oldest fossiliferous system, the Old Red Sand- 
stone, is very nearly complete ; and to such a breadth do 
we find it developed, especially in the southern and north- 
ern parts of the inclosing frame, that, with the addition of 
a few patches in the border counties of Scotland, we find 
it occupying nearly five thousand square miles of the sur- 
face of our country. 1 ] Outside the Old Red Sandstone 
frame there occurs to the south, in the line of the great 
flat valley which runs across the country from the Frith 
of Forth to that of the Clyde, a broad belt of the Coal 
Measures, — the system which succeeds to it in natural 
sequence ; but on the east, west, and north, the Coal Meas- 
ures and New Red Sandstone are wanting, and we find 
fragments of a ring of Lias, as at Applecross, on the one 
coast, and at Cromarty and Shandwick on the other; and 
outside the Lias, considerable fragments of yet another 
and wider ring of the Oolite. The sea on the east coast, 
and both that and numerous outbursts of overlying trap 

1 The Old Red Sandstone frame, and its corresponding illustrations, no 
longer hold good. The geology of north-western Scotland has recently 
been investigated by Sir Roderick Murchison, from whose researches it 
appears that Silurian strata occupy a much wider area of that district than 
had been previously suspected. Aided by Mr. Peach's discover} 7 of Lower 
Silurian fossils in the crystalline limestones of Sutherlandshire, Sir Roder- 
ick has succeeded in showing that from the Atlantic to the German Ocean 
there is a regular succession of strata in ascending order, representing the 
Laurentian gneiss of Canada and the Cambrian and Lower Silurian rocks 
of Wales, and superposed upon these older formations in the great Old 
Red Sandstone of Caithness. See the abstract of Sir Roderick Murchison's 
paper in the Reports of the Leeds Meeting of the British Association. — G. 



144 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

on the west, covers up the ring which lies beyond; but 
the Chalk flints and Greensand fossils of Aberdeen and 
Banff shires on the one hand, and the Chalk flints of Mull 
and Caithness on the other, indicate its existence and its 
components. An outer ring or frame of Chalk and Green- 
sand, more or less broken, surrounds on two, mayhap on 
three sides, the central nucleus of the kingdom ; and were 
the beds of the German and Atlantic Ocean to be laid dry 
to the depth of about fifty fathoms, and the area of Scot- 
land to be proportionally extended, you would find for- 
mation succeeding formation, in crossing the ring from the 
nucleus outwards, as we find them succeeding each other 
in the south of England, when crossing the country from 
South Wales in the direction of London. Beyond this 
outer ring of Chalk there lie, it is more than probable, 
deposits of the Tertiary system. Of the Mull deposits on 
the west coast we at least know, though they occur in so 
disturbed and overflown a district, that they lie outside 
the Secondary deposits of the island; and again on the 
east coast, where the Tertiary deposits, which occupy so 
large a portion of the south-eastern portion of England, 
outside the Chalk, lose themselves in the German Ocean, 
the dredge has found interesting trace of them far at sea 
running northwards, to form, apparently, our submarine 
belt or ring. It is stated by Woodward, in his " Geology 
of Norfolk," that the oyster-fishers on that coast dredged 
up from a tract of oyster-beds near Happesburgh no fewer 
than two thousand grinders of mammoths in the course of 
thirteen years. Further, those parts of the Continent 
which lie opposite our eastern coasts, including Holland, 
Hanover, and the larger part of Denmark, all consist of 
deposits of the Tertiary system, which, trending westwards 
at a low angle, form, it is probable, no inconsiderable part 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 145 

of the bed of the German Ocean. Those beds, however, 
from which our Scottish amber is derived must lie deep in 
the sea, outside the Lias, the Oolite, the Greensand, and 
the Chalk; and our specimens are rare in consequence, 
because at great depths the bottom is little affected by 
tempests. Not less than eight hundred pounds weight of 
this substance has been thrown up on the coast of east 
Prussia by a single storm. 

From the Tertiaries we would naturally pass, in our 
upward progress, to the Secondary deposits ; and of these, 
the remains of the Cretaceous system, as exhibited in 
Banff and Aberdeen shires, would, of course, first solicit 
notice, as representative in Scotland of that portion of the 
Secondary period nearest our own, — the period with 
which this great middle division of the earth's history 
terminated. I must first, however, call your attention to 
a series of rocks which, without belonging to any of the 
three great sedimentary divisions, seem in our own coun- 
try to have been contemporary with them all. I refer to 
the trap rocks of the kingdom. The Duke of Argyle 
found in the island of Mull, as has been already shown, 
thick beds of trap, tuffacious and basaltic, overlying beds 
of the Tertiary division. Again, in the Isle of Skye, Pro- 
fessor Edward Forbes has detected trap beds which made 
their way to the surface, and overflowed the shells and 
corals of the Oolite, about the middle of the great Sec- 
ondary period. " The thick sheet of imperfectly columnar 
basalt," says the Professor, " which has so wide an exten- 
sion in the island of Skye, and plays so important ^a part 
in the formation of the magnificent scenery of its coasts, 
was the product of a submarine eruption, which, if we 
regard the basalt as an overflow, has its geological date 
marked to a nicety, having occurred at the close of the 

13 



146 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

middle and at the commencement of the upper Oolitic 
period." Yet again, in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, 
as well described by Mr. Charles M'Laren, there are traps 
of the Palaeozoic division, — beds of stratified tuff, as 
among the rocks of the Calton Hill, for instance, — that 
belong to the early part of the Carboniferous period ; and 
I have seen at Oban a conglomerate low in the Old Red 
Sandstone, formed chiefly of a trap, which even at that 
early time must have been a surface rock much exposed to 
denudation. We must regard, then, the trap rocks of 
Scotland as of all ages, from the earlier Palaeozoic to the 
middle Tertiary periods. The great ganoidal fishes of the 
Devonian and Carboniferous ages, the huge reptiles of the 
Oolite, and the gigantic mammals of the Miocene, must 
have been exposed, in turn, in what is now Scotland, to 
delu^ino; outbursts of molten matter from the vexed bow- 
els of the earth, and to overwhelming showers of volcanic 
ashes. 

I would, however, crave attention to the curious fact, 
that dining this immensely protracted period of Plutonic 
activity, the deep-seated agencies operated in nearly the 
same lines. Masses of the incarcerated matter seem to 
have made their escape age after age along the same weak 
parts of their prison walls, — the earth's crust; and in 
Scotland we have two of those lines of apparent weakness 
which converge in a greatly overflown district in the north 
of Ireland. One of these lines runs along the inner Heb- 
rides nearly south and north, and includes in its area, as 
distinct centres of Plutonic action, the islands of Skye 
and of Mull, with what are known as the Small Isles lying 
between, and the promontory of Ardnamurchan. The 
other line sweeps across the country from north-east to 
south-west, commencing at Dunbar on the eastj ah t ter- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 147 

Urinating, in Scotland, with Arran and Campbelton on the 
west ; but running, as I have said, across the Irish Sea, it 
reappears in Ulster. It includes, among many lesser trap 
eminences, the Campsie, the Ochil, and the Lomond hills; 
the eminences also on which the castles of Stirling and 
Dumbarton are built; the hills which give character to 
the scenery around Edinburgh, — Corstorphine, Blackford-, 
the Pentlands, the Castle rock, the Calton, Salisbury Crags, 
and Arthur's Seat; and far to the east, that Haddington 
group of trap hills to which North Berwick Law, the Bass, 
and the Isle of May belong. Beyond these great lines of 
injected cracks and filled-up craters, especially to the 
north and east, there are wide districts in Scotland in 
which there does not occur a single trap rock. The lava- 
like flood found its way to the surface from the fiery depths 
beneath, through the chinks and crannies which we now 
find indicated by the dikes and insulated stacks and hills 
of what we may term the Lothian and Iiebridean lines, 
and through these only; and those portions of the Low- 
lands of Scotland which lie to the north of the Grampians, 
such as the plains of Caithness, Moray, and Easter Ross, 
joresent, from the absence of the trap, an entirely different 
character from that exhibited by the Lowlands of the 
South. 

The igneous rocks have been divided, according to their 
mineral or mechanical character, into tuffs, amygdaloids, 
porphyries, dolerites, claystones, clinkstones, wackes, tra- 
chytes, and various other species. For our present pur- 
pose, however, and as adequate to the demands of our 
necessarily brief and imperfect sketch, we may regard the 
trap rocks as consisting of but two great divisions, — first, 
the traps proper, including all igneous masses, from the 
porphyries to the basalts, which were ejected from the 



148 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

abyss in a molten form, and which either overflowed from 
their vents and craters certain portions of the earth's sur- 
face, whether subaqueous or subaerial, or, forcing their way 
between strata of the sedimentary rocks, formed among 
them dikes, or beds, or pillar-like masses; and secondly, 
trap-tuffs, which, though igneous in their components, were 
ejected from craters in the form of loose ashes and de- 
tached fragments, or were ground down by the agency of 
water, and subsequently arranged in regular strata under 
the same laws which have given their stratification to the 
rocks of aqueous origin amid which we so frequently find 
these trap-tuffs intercalated. You will at once see that 
the division here is a natural one. There is a wide differ- 
ence betwixt a stratum of broken glass and scoriae, the 
debris of a glass-house arranged by the tide on the beach 
on which it had been cast down a few hours before, and a 
continuous sheet of plate-glass still retaining its place in 
the mould into which it had been run off by sluices from 
the furnace. And such is the difference between trap-tuff 
and trap proper. We have to arrive, too, when we find 
them occurring, as in this neighborhood, among the rocks 
of a district, at very different conclusions regarding their 
date and history. Without inquiring whether in some 
rare instances an eruption of volcanic mud might not possi- 
bly be ejected, by a sort of hydraulic-press process, between 
strata of previously existing rock, and thus a tuff-bed come 
to be formed which was not only newer than the stratum 
on which it rested, but also than that by which it was 
overlaid, we may receive it as a general fact, that the true 
tuff-bed, like beds of the ordinary sedimentary rocks, is 
more modern than the stratum on which it rests, and more 
ancient than the stratum which overlies it ; that if it oc- 
cur, for instance, among the Old Red Sandstones, it belongs 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 149 

to the age of the Old Red Sandstones ; if among the Coal 
Measures, to the age of the Coal Measures ; and if among 
the Oolites, to the age of the Oolites. But we cannot 
predicate after the same fashion, that the bed of trap 
proper which we find resting over one series of sediment- 
ary strata and under another is of nearly the same age as 
the rock above and below, or just a little older than the 
upper and a little newer than the nether ones. It may 
have been injected among them many ages after their 
deposition, during even an entirely different period of the 
earth's history. We may safely infer, that those beds of 
stratified trap-tuff which alternate in the Calton Hill with 
beds of trap-porphyry belong to the Carboniferous period, 
and are very considerably older than the overlying sand- 
stones and shales on which Regent Terrace is built ; but 
we can no more infer that the great bed of greenstone 
which forms the picturesque crown of Salisbury Crags is 
of the same age as the rocks among which it occurs, or, 
more strictly, a little newer than the strata below and a 
little older than the strata above, than we can infer that a 
cast-iron wheel or axle is of the same age as the mould into 
which it was run, or, more strictly, a little newer than the 
bottom of the mould, and a little older than the top of it. 1 
Let us now devote a brief space to the consideration of 

1 The usual test of the age of these melted traps is the relation they 
hear to the rocks which overlie them. If the part of the superjacent bed 
resting on the igneous rock present an altered appearance, as if it had 
been more or less baked in a furnace, the trap is regarded as intrusive, that 
is, it forced its way between the planes of the strata, and must conse- 
quently be of later age. If, on the other hand, the beds above display no 
symptom of alteration, and more especially if they consist of trap-tuff, the 
underlying igneous rock may be presumed to have been erupted either under 
water or in open air, as the case may be : and hence it is regarded as in a 
general way contemporaneous with the strata among which it occurs — G. 

13* 



150 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

the scenery usually associated with the trap rocks, — a 
subject which should possess some little interest to an 
Edinburgh audience, seeing that their most magnificent 
of cities owes almost all that is imposing and peculiar in 
its aspect and appearance to this cause. The scenery of 
a trap district may be resolved into two coupon ents. In 
an ancient ruin we frequently see stones hollowed by decay 
into a sort of fantastic fretwork., not very unlike that 
which roughens some of our more ancient runic obelisks ; 
and we recognize as the cause of these irregularities of 
surface on which the effect depends, certain original ine- 
qualities in the texture of the mass, and certain weather- 
ing influences, which, while they wore away the softer por- 
tions, spared such as were harder and more durable. And 
such, on a larger scale, are the two elements operative in 
the production of the peculiarities of trap scenery. The 
hard trap rocks injected into the comparatively soft sand- 
stones and shales of a district,- such as that which sur- 
rounds the Scottish capital, compose a mass of very various 
texture and solidity, which, if operated upon equally by 
some power analogous to the weathering one in the case 
of the fretted stone, would necessarily yield unequally / 
and the weathering influences we find represented on the 
large scale by the denuding agencies. The noble eminen- 
ces which give character and individuality to our city 
were literally scooped out of the general mass by tides, 
and waves, and deep-acting currents, as the sculptor chis- 
els out his figures, in executing some piece in alto relievo, 
by chipping away the surrounding plane. The bold figure 
of the j^oet Hogg becomes almost a literality here : 

" Who was it scooped these stony waves ? 
Who scalp'd the brows of old Cairngorm, 
And dug these ever-yawning caves? 
'T was I, the spirit of the storm." 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 151 

The masses of enclosed trap are of various forms. Some- 
times they occur as deeply-based pillar-like masses, filling 
up, it is possible, ancient craters. The rock of hard clink- 
stone on which the Castle of Edinburgh stands is one of 
these ; but the long-inclined plane of sedimentary deposits 
which it shielded from the wear of the western current 
interferes with its column-like outline. The Bass rock is 
an example of the same kind, with no sedimentary tail to 
mar the effect of its natural outline. The dike is another 
and yet more characteristic form of trap rock : it is a rock 
that was moulded in a longitudinal crack or rent, as the 
other was moulded in a well-like crater ; and when the 
original matrix in which it was cast has been washed from 
its sides, and it remains standing up over the level, it 
assumes the wall-like or dike-like form to which it owes its 
name. In sailing along the west coast of Scotland in a 
clear sunny day, that gives to each projecting crag its 
deep patch of shadow, these fragments of walls, of vastly 
more ancient date than the oldest and most venerable of 
our Scottish ruins, may be seen rising from the beach 
along the faces of grassy banks or rounded tuft-formed 
precipices, and communicating to the general scenery one 
of its most characteristic features. But one of the main 
scenic peculiarities of the trap districts is derivable from 
their trap beds. We find in this neighborhood, among 
the hills of the Queen's Park, bed rolled over bed, with 
bands of shale, or sandstone, or soft trap-tuff, between; 
and these beds, ranged often in nearly parallel lines, and 
bared by the denuding agencies, present not unfrequently, 
seen in profile, the appearance of a flight of steps. Hence 
the generic name for this class of rocks, — trappa, a stair : 
the traps are the stair-like rocks. As seen in a calm, clear 
morning, from nearly the eastern termination of Regent 



152 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

Terrace, the Arthur Seat group of hills exhibits three 
of these beds ranged for considerable distances in nearly 
parallel lines, and, with these, well-marked fragments of 
several others. First, reckoning from the west or south, 
there is the continuous greenstone bed of Salisbury crags ; 
next, the partially-broken bed of greenstone porphyry 
known as the Bay Crag; next, the continuous bed of 
compact greenstone known as the Hill Crag, — that along 
the top of which the path ascends to the summit of Arthur 
Seat from St. Anthony's Well ; and then there are at least 
two beds of basalt, partially sanded over, which rise in 
interrupted steps along the face of the eastern hill. These 
beds form the peculiar feature of the fine fragment of land- 
scape which from this point of view the Arthur Seat group 
of hills composes. 1 The trap scenery may be described 
generally as eminently picturesque. From the circum- 
stance that its eruptive masses rise often from amid level 
fields, and that its hard abrupt beds, dikes, and columns, 
alternate often with rich, soft strata, that decompose into 
fertile soils, it abounds in striking contrasts. The soft 
plain ascends often at one stride into a hill fantastically 
rugged and abrupt ; and bare and fractured precipices 
overtop terraced slopes or level platforms, rich in verdure. 
Some of the more famed scenery of England owes its 
beauty to the trap rocks. Hagley, the seat of the Lyttle- 
tons, so celebrated in the English poetry of the last cen- 
tury for its beauty, is situated half on a range of pictur- 
esque trap hills, half on a level plain of the New Red 
Sandstone; and the far-famed view from the Leasowes 

1 On the west coast of Mull, and the islands of Gometra and Ulva, six 
or eight of these step-like beds may be seen, rising the one over the 
other, like terraces or stories in a building; and the whole landscape 
seems barred with right lines, that in this district lie nearly parallel to the 
horizon. 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 153 

owes much of its beauty to the traps of the Clent Hills. 
But it would be unpardonable, in treating, however 
slightly, of the scenery of the trap, to omit all refer- 
ence to one of its strangest features, — those of ranges 
of polygonal columns which, in at least the more perfect 
specimens are peculiar to it, and which impart to dame 
Nature, in so many instances, those qualities of propor- 
tion and regularity in which art alone can pretend to 
vie with or surpass her. The specimens in our own 
neighborhood are either of small extent, as in Samson's 
Ribs, or both that and of imperfect form, as at St. An- 
thony's Chapel and in the adjacent hill-front; but I have 
seen in the neighborhood of Linlithgow a range of slender 
columns sufficiently regular to have given rise to a tra- 
ditional myth in the locality, that they owe their origin 
to the ingenuity of the old Picts; and the columned 
scuir of Eigg greatly surpasses in grandeur the far-famed 
Giants' Causeway, and scarce falls short of it in the sym- 
metry of its strange architecture. To that wondrous 
ocean cave of the west which an enlightened age con- 
tinues to recognize as one of the marvels of Scotland, 
I need but refer in the graphic verse which the Ettrick 
Shepherd has transferred, in his "Queen's Wake," to 
"Allan Bawn, the bard of Mull." 

" Awed to deep silence,, they tread the strand, 
Where furnaced pillars in order stand; 
All framed of the liquid burning levin, 
And bent like the bow that spans the heaven; 
Or upright ranged, in wondrous array, 
With purple of green o'er the darksome gray. 
The solemn rows in that ocean den 
Were dimly seen like the forms of men; 
Like giant monks in ages agone, 
Whom the god of the ocean had sear'd to stone ; 
And their path was on wondrous pavement old, 
In blocks all cast in some giant mould." 



154 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

The old scenery of the trap rocks of Scotland, — the 
scenery associated with them when our country, along at 
least its two great lines of trappean eruption, was a Terra 
del Fuego, — a land of fire, — it would require some of 
that poetic faculty to restore which I would fain challenge 
for the geologist. Even in the immediate neighborhood 
of the capital, the rocky crust of the earth has been 
heaved into vast waves by the imprisoned Plutonic agen- 
cies struggling for vent ; huge floods of molten matter, 
now hardened into mountain masses, have been injected 
with earthquake throes between the folds of the stony 
strata; and a submarine volcano has darkened the heavens 
with its ashes, shutting out during the day the light of 
the sun, and throwing its red gleam, when the night had 
fallen, over the steaming eddies of a boiling and broken 
sea. The area which we now occupy has heaved like the 
deck of a storm-beset vessel ; the solid earth has been 
rent asunder; and through the wide cracks and fissures, 
now existing as greenstone dikes, the red molten matter 
has come rushing through. Could we this evening ascend 
into the remote past, when that picturesque eminence 
wmich overlooks Edinburgh, — according to the poet 
Malcolm, 

" Arthur's craggy bulk, 
That dweller of the air, abrupt and lone," — 

was, like the son of Semele, first ushered into the world 
amid smoke and flame, you would find the scene such 
as poets might well desire to contemplate, or solicit the 
aid of their muse adequately to describe. For many ages, 
what now exists as the picturesque tract of hill and valley 
attached to old Holyrood, and to which the privileges 
of the court still extend, had existed as a tract of shallow 
sea, darkened, when the tide fell, by algae-covered rocks 



LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 155 

and banks, and much beaten by waves. From time im- 
memorial has the portion of the earth's crust which under- 
lies that shallow sea been a scene of deep-seated igneous 
action. Vast beds of trappean rock — greenstone, and 
columnar basalt, and amygdaloidal porphyry — have been 
wedged from beneath, as molten injections, between the 
old sedimentary strata; vast waves of translation have 
come rolling onwards from that disturbed centre, as some 
submarine hill, elevated by the force of the fiery injection 
— as the platform of a hydraulic press is elevated when 
the pump is plied — has raised its broad back over the 
tide, only, however, to yield piecemeal to the denuding 
currents and the storm-raised surf of centuries. And 
now, for day after day has there been a succession of 
earthquake shocks, that, as the plutonic paroxysm in- 
creases in intensity, become stronger and more frequent, 
and the mountain waves roll outwards in ever-widening 
circles, to rise and fall in distant and solitary seas, or 
to break in long lines of foam on nameless islands un- 
known to the geographer. And over the roar of waves or 
the rush of tides we may hear the growlings of a subter- 
ranean thunder, that now dies away in low, deep mutter- 
ings, and now, ere some fresh earthquake-shock tempests 
the sea, bellows wildly from the abyss. The billows fall 
back in boiling eddies; the solid strata are upheaved 
into a flat dome, crusted with corals and shells ; it cracks, 
it severs, a dark gulf yawns suddenly in the midst; a 
dense, strongly variegated cloud of mingled smoke and 
steam arises black as midnight in its central volumes, 
but chequered, where the boiling waves hiss at its edge, 
with wreaths of white ; and anon with the noise of many 
waters, a broad sheet of flame rushes upwards a thousand 
fathoms into the sky. Vast masses of molten rock, that 



156 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

glow red amid even the light of day, are hurled into the 
air, and then, with hollow sound, fall back into the chasm, 
or, descending hissing amid the vexed waters, fling high 
the hot spray, and send the cross circlets of wave which 
they raise athwart the heavings of the huger billows pro- 
pelled from the disturbed centre within. The crater rises 
as the thick showers of ashes descend; and amid the 
rending of rocks, the roaring of flames, the dashings of 
waves, the hissings of submerged lava, and the hollow 
grumblings of the abyss, the darkness of a starless night 
descends upon the deep. Anon, and we are startled by 
the shock of yet another and more terrible earthquake ; 
yet another column of flame rushes into the sky, casting a 
lurid illumination on the thick rolling reek and the pitchy 
heavings of the wave; seen but for a moment, we may 
mark the silvery glitter of scales, for there is a shoal of 
dead fish floating past ; and as the coruscations of an 
electric lightning darts in a thousand fiery tongues from 
the cloud, some startled monster of the deep bellows in 
terror from the dank sea beyond. 

Let us raise the curtain once more from over the past of 
the trap districts of Scotland. Myriads of ages have 
come and gone ; the submarine volcano has been long 
extinguished ; and the land, elevated high over the waters, 
has become a scene of human habitation. But the wild 
country, marked by the well-known features of abrupt 
precipitous hill and deep retiring valley, is roughened 
by many a shaggy wood, and gleams with many a blue 
lochan, and even its richer plains are but partially broken 
up by the plough. And lo ! the trappean centres of the 
district are scenes of fierce war, as of old; but it is not 
the dead uninformed elements, — fire, earth, and water, — 
but energetic, impassioned man, that now contends, and 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 157 

in fierce warfare battles, with his kind. Yonder, on its 
trap rock, once the crater of a volcano, is the fortress of 
the Bass, the stronghold that last surrendered in Britain 
to William of Nassau ; and yonder, on its trap rock, 
the castle of Dunbar, that brave black Agnes held out 
in so determined a spirit against the English ; and yonder, 
on its trap rock, the castle of Dirleton, which stood siege 
in behalf of our country against Edward I. ; and yonder, 
on its trap rock, scaled by Lord Randolph of old when he 
warred for the Bruce, is the castle of Edinburgh, the 
scene of a hundred fights, and surrounded by the halo 
of a thousand historic associations; and yonder, on its 
trap rock, is the castle of Stirling, with the battle-ground 
of Scotland at its feet, and to maintain which against 
the greatest of our Scottish kings, the second Edward 
vainly fought the battle of Bannockburn ; and yonder, on 
its trap rock, is the castle of Dumbarton, long impregna- 
ble, but which the soldier of the Reformation won at such 
fearful risk from the partisans of Mary. I remember at 
one time deeming it not a little curious that the early 
geological history of a country should often, as in this 
instance, seem typical of its subsequent civil history. If 
a country's geologic history had been very disturbed, — if 
the trap rock had broken out from below, and tilted up its 
strata in a thousand abrupt angles, steep precipices, and 
yawning chasms, I found the chances as ten to one that 
there succeeded, when man came upon the scene, a his- 
tory, scarce less disturbed, of fierce wars, protracted sieges, 
and desperate battles. The stormy morning during which 
merely the angry elements had contended, I found suc- 
ceeded in almost every instance by a stormy day, mad- 
dened by the turmoil of human passion. But a little re- 
flection dissipated the mystery ; though it served to show 

14 



105 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

through what immense periods mere physical causes may 
continue to operate with moral effect, and how, in the 
purposes of Him who saw the end from the beginning, a 
scene of fiery confusion — of roaring waves and heaving 
earthquakes, of ascending hills and deepening valleys — 
may have been closely associated with the right develop- 
ment and ultimate dignity and happiness of the moral 
agent of creation, — unborn at the time, — reasoning, re- 
sponsible man. It is amid these centres of geologic dis- 
turbance, the natural strongholds of the earth, that the 
true battles of the race, the battles of civilization and civil 
liberty, have been successfully maintained by handfuls of 
hardy men, against the despot-led myriads of the plains. 
In glancing over a map of Euroj:>e and the countries 
adjacent, on which the mountain groups are marked, you 
will at once perceive that Greece and the Holy Land, 
Scotland and the Swiss cantons, formed centres of great 
j)lutonic disturbance of this character. They had each 
their geologic tremors and perturbations, — their pro- 
tracted periods of eruption and earthquake, — long ere 
their analogous civil history, with its ages of convulsion 
and revolution, in which man was the agent, had yet com- 
menced its course. And, indirectly at least, the disturbed 
civil history was in each instance a consequence of the 
disturbed geologic one. 

From the Tertiary deposits we pass direct to the few 
scattered remains which survive in Scotland of the Cre- 
taceous period. It is now nearly thirty years since it was 
found by geologists that chalk flints inclosing in many 
specimens the peculiar organisms of the system, occur in 
the superficial deposits of Banff and Aberdeenshires ; and 
about three years ago they were also discovered by a very 
ingenious man, a Thurso tradesman, Mr. Robert Dick, in 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. lo9 

the boulder-clays of Caithness. It is, however, a curious 
fact, that what the geologist has only come to know within 
the course of the present generation was well known to 
the wild aboriginal inhabitants of the country some three 
or four thousand years ago. Well-nigh one half the 
ancient arrow and smaller javelin heads of the stone- 
period in Scotland, especially those found to the north 
of the Grampians, were fashioned out of the yellow Aber- 
deenshire flints. A history of those arts of savage life 
which the course of discovery served to supplant and 
obliterate, but which could not be carried on without a 
knowledge of substances and qualities afterwards lost, 
until re-discovered by scientific curiosity, would form an 
exceedingly curious one. On finding, a good many years 
ago, a vein of a bituminous jet in one of the ichthyolite 
beds of the Old Red Sandstone of Ross, — beds unknown 
at the time to even our first geologists, — it curiously 
impressed me to remember that my discovery was, after 
all, only a discovery at second-hand ; for that in an un- 
glazed hand-made urn of apparently a very early period, 
dug up in the neighborhood only a few years before, 
there had been found a very primitive necklace, fashioned 
out of evidently the same jet. It would seem that to 
these ichthyolite beds, unknown at the time in the district 
to all but myself, the savage inhabitants had had recourse 
for the materials for their rude ornaments thousands of 
years before. They were mineralogists enough, too, as 
their stone hatchets and battle-axes testify, to know where 
the best tool and weapon-making rocks occur; and I once 
found in a northern locality a battle-axe of an exceeding 
strong and tough variety of indurated talc, that nearly 
approached in character to the axe-stone of Werner, which, 
if native to Scotland at all, is so in some primary district 



180 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

which I am not mineralogist enough to indicate. It 
shows us after how strange a fashion extremes may 
meet, — that rude savages, ignorant of the use of the 
metals, and the scientific explorers of a highly civilized 
age, rationally desirous to know how the adorable Creator 
wrought upon this earth of old, ere man had yet entered 
upon it as a scene of probation, should have formed an 
acquaintance with the same class of objects, — classes of 
objects of which the men of an intervening period knew 
nothing. 

The chalk fragments and flints of Caithness and Banff 
seem to have been carried eastward on the occidental 
current of the Pleistocene period, — those of the one 
county from that western portion of the chalk ring or 
girdle to which I have already referred as lying in the 
Atlantic, and those of the other from that eastern portion 
of the ring which is buried in the outer reaches of the 
Moray Frith. In Aberdeenshire, however, some twenty 
miles or so to the north of the city, in the parish of Ellon 
and some of the contiguous parishes, and running at a 
considerable distance inland in a line nearly parallel to 
the coast, the flints so abound, and, unlike those of the 
English gravels, are so little water-worn as to give evi- 
dence that they must have been derived from the disinte- 
gration of outliers of the system that once existed, it is 
probable, in their immediate neighborhood. They over- 
lie, too, in some parts of this locality, what seems to be a 
re-formation of the greensand; of which the soft, inco- 
herent masses, containing, as they do, in some, in a good 
state of keeping, some of the more fragile organisms of 
the deposit, could not possibly have travelled far* The 
fossils of our chalk flints and of the underlying greensand 
are sufficiently numerous and characteristic to serve the 



LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 161 

purpose of identifying the worn and scattered deposits in 
which they occur with the amply developed chalks and 
greensancls of England, but perhaps not sufficiently so, nor 
yet always in a sufficiently fine state of preservation, to 
render the district a very hopeful scene of labor to the col- 
lector desirous absolutely to extend our knowledge of the 
extinct forms of life. I have seen, however, especially in 
the collections of Dr. Fleming, the Rev. Mr. Longmuir, of 
Aberdeen, and Mr. Fergusson, of Glasgow, fine and very 
characteristic specimens of the Scotch Chalk, — delicate 
flustra sponges and corals locked up in flint, — well- 
marked portions of the sea-egg order (Echinidas) belong- 
ing to the cidarite, galerite, and spatangus families, — 
terebratulaa of various species, — good specimens of that 
very characteristic conchifer of the Chalk, the Inoceramus, 
— with casts of minute belemnites and portions of ammo- 
nites and bacnlites. The group of remains preserved is 
unequivocally that of the Cretaceous fauna, just as Scot- 
land has also a group of archaeological remains decidedly 
Roman ; though in either case these remains serve but for 
purposes of identification with larger groups elsewhere : 
and in order thoroughly to study either the one or the 
other, the antiquary or geologist would have to remove 
from what is equally the outskirts of the old Roman or 
old Cretaceous empire, towards its centre in the south. 

All our geologists agree in holding that the Chalk was 
deposited in an ocean of very considerable depth, and of 
such extent that it must have covered for many ages the 
greater part of what is now southern and central Europe. 
It has been traced in one direction from the north of Ire- 
land to the Crimea in Southern Russia, a distance of about 
twelve hundred miles ; and in another direction from the 
south of Sweden to the southwest of France, a distance of 

H* 



162 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

about nine hundred miles ; and there are extensive districts 
both in France and England where it attains to an average 
thickness of not less than a thousand feet. The only anal- 
ogous deposit of the present time occurs on comparatively 
a small scale among the coralline reefs and lagoons of the 
Pacific, where there is in the act of forming an impalpable 
white mud derived from the corals, which in dried speci- 
mens cannot be distinguished by the unassisted eye from 
masses of soft chalk. But what chiefly distinguishes the 
true chalk from any of its modern representatives is the 
amazing number of microscopic animals which it contains. 
On a low estimate, half its entire bulk is composed of 
animalculites of such amazing minuteness, that it has been 
calculated by Ehrenberg that each cubic inch of chalk may 
contain upwards of a million of the shells of these crea- 
tures. The chalk rocks so characteristic of the sister king- 
dom have been often sung by the poets as 

" Rising like white ramparts all along 
The blue sea's border." 

And, in especial, one " chalky bourn of dread and dizzy 
summit" has been made by the greatest of poets the sub- 
ject of the sublimest description of a giddy, awe-inspiring 
precipice ever drawn. And here is there a new associa- 
tion with which to connect the chalk cliffs of England. 
Every fragment of these cliffs was once associated with 
animal life; that impalpable white dust which gives a 
milky hue to the waves as they dash against them, consists 
of curiously organized skeletons ; even the white line which 
I draw along the board, were our eyes to be suddenly 
endowed with a high microscopic power, would resem- 
ble part of the wall of a grotto covered over with shells. 
And, embedded in this mass of minute, nicely-framed 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 163 

invisibilities, — Polythalamia, Foraminifera, Polyporia, and 
Diatomacese, — we find fossils of larger size, such as Sjia- 
tangus-cor and the spiny Plagiostoma, which seem to 
have found proper habitats in the mud formed by the 
dead remains of these animalculae. Curious examples of 
a similar kind may be still seen among the Hebrides, of 
sand-burrowing molluscs and echinoderms finding habitats 
amid accumulations of the debris of organic life, chiefly 
comminuted shells, on coasts where otherwise there could 
have been no place for them. The deep-sea shells pro- 
pelled shorewards by the agency of tides and waves are 
ground down by the action of the surf against the rocks. 
They may be seen occurring in the hollows of the skerries, 
as one passes shorewards along some of the rocky bays, 
in handfuls of more and more comminuted fragments, just 
as, in passing along the successive vats of a paper-mill, one 
finds the linen rags more and more disintegrated by the 
cylinders ; and then, within some sheltering shelf or ledge, 
we find the gathered handfuls of former ages spreading 
into a wave-rippled beach of minute shelly particles, that 
presents, save in its snow-white color, the appearance of 
sandy beaches of the ordinary mineral components. But 
the beach once formed in this way soon begins to receive 
accessions from the exuviae of animals that love such 
localities, — spatangi, razor-fish, cockles, and the several 
varieties of the gaper family, — and that enjoy life agree- 
ably to their natures and constitutions, not the least sad- 
dened by the idea that they are living amid the rubbish of 
a charnel-house ; and sometimes one-half the whole beach 
comes thus to be composed of a class of remains that, save 
for the previous existence of the other half of it, could not 
have been formed in such localities at all. Now, such 
must have been the state of matters in the times of the 



164 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

Chalk. Unnumbered millions must have died in order 
that the medium might be provided in which a class of 
their successors could alone live. Of the land which 
skirted this ocean of the Chalk, or of its productions, we 
know almost nothing. There have been found in Chalk 
flints a few fragments of silicified wood, and, in one or two 
instances, the cones of cycadaceous plants ; and the upper 
beds of the system have furnished the remains of a gigan- 
tic lizard, — the Mosasaurus, with those of turtles, tor- 
toises, and Pterodactyls. True, the Mosasaurus may have 
been, as Cuvier supposed, a marine reptile, and the turtles 
must have been so ; but then both, as egg-bearing animals, 
must have brought forth their young on some shore ; and 
the tortoises, with the Pterodactyl or flying lizard, must be 
regarded as decidedly terrestrial. Such is almost all we 
yet know of the flora or fauna of the land of the Chalk ; 
whereas in marine organisms the system is so exceedingly 
rich, that its ascertained species amount, we find it stated 
by Brown, to about three thousand. The geologic dio- 
rama abounds in strange contrasts. When the curtain last 
rose upon our country, we looked abroad over the amber- 
producing forests of the Tertiary period, with their sunlit 
glades and brown and bosky recesses, and we saw, far dis- 
tant on the skirts of the densely wooded land, a fire-belch- 
ing volcano, over-canopied by its cloud of smoke and 
ashes. And now, when the curtain again rises, we see 
the same tract occupied, far as the eye can reach, by a 
broad ocean, traversed by a pale milky line, that wends its 
dimpling way through the blue expanse, like a river through 
a meadow. That milky way of turbid waiter indicates the 
course of a deep-setting current, that disturbs, far beneath, 
the impalpable mud of the Chalk. Sailing molluscs career 
in their galleys of pearl over the surface of this ancient 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 165 

sea ; fishes of long extinct species dart with sudden gleam 
through its middle depths; and far below, on its white 
floor, the sea urchin creeps, and the spatangus burrows, 
and crania and terebratulse have cast anchor, and the 
Crista Galli (or carinated oyster) opens its curiously 
plicated valves, carved with the zigzag mouldings of a 
Norman doorway, and the flower-like marsupite expands 
its living petals. And, dim and distant in the direction 
of the future Grampians, we may espy a cloud-enveloped 
island ; but such is its remoteness, and such the enveloping 
haze, that we can know little more than that it bears along 
its shores and on its middle heights a forest of nameless 
trees, unchronicled by the fossil botanist. 

In bringing to a close this part of my subject, let me 
here remark, that, if we except the obscure and humbly 
organized diatomaceas, — a microscopic family of organ- 
isms which some of our authorities deem animal and some 
vegetable, and of which hundreds and thousands would 
find ample room in a single drop of water, — we have 
now reached a point in the history of our country, in 
which there existed no species of plant or animal that 
exists at the present time. Not a reptile, fish, mollusc, or 
zoophyte of the Cretaceous system continues to live. We 
know that it is appointed for all individuals once to die, 
whatever their tribe or family, because hitherto all indi- 
viduals have died ; and Geology, by extending our expe- 
rience, shows us that the same fate awaits on species as on 
the individuals that compose them. In the one case, too, 
as in the other, death has its special laws; but the laws 
which determine the life and death of species seem widely 
different from those which regulate the life and death of 
individuals and generations. In general, and with but a 
few exceptions in favor of the cold-blooded division of the 



1G3 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

vertebrata, the higher order of animals live longest. A 
man may survive for a hundred years ; an ephemera 
bursts from its shell in the morning, and dies at night. 
But it is far otherwise with the higher orders of species. 
Molluscs and corals outlive the vertebrata ; and tribes of 
the low infusory animals outlive molluscs and corals. We 
know not that a single shell of at least the latter Pleis- 
tocene period has become extinct ; but many of its noblest 
quadrupeds, such as the Irish elk, the cave-bear, tiger, and 
hyena, and the northern rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and 
elephant, exist no longer. And as we rise into the remote 
past, and take farewell, one after one, of even the lower 
forms, — shells and corals, — and get into a formation all 
of whose visible organisms are old-fashioned and extinct, 
we apply the microscope to its impalpable dust, and again, 
among still humbler and lowlier shapes, find ourselves in 
the presence of the familiar and the recent. In another 
sense than that which the old poet contemplated, we learn 
from the history of species that the most lowly are the 
most safe. 

" The tallest pines feel most the power 

Of wintry blasts : the loftiest tower 
Comes heaviest to the ground. 

The holts that spare the mountain side 

His cloud-cap't eminence divide, 
And spread the ruin round." 

How long some of these extinct species may have lived 
we know not, and may never know; but in all cases their 
term of existence must have been very extended. Even 
the extinct elephant lived long enough as a species to 
whiten the plains of Siberia with huge bones, and to form 
quarries of ivory that have furnished the ivory market 
for year after year with its largest supplies. And of some 
of the humbler species of animals, the period during which 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 167 

they have continued to live must have been vastly more 
protracted. Cyprina Islandica seems to have come into 
existence at least as early as the fossil elephant ; and now, 
thousands of years after the boreal pachyderm is gone, the 
boreal shell still exists by millions, and evinces no symp- 
tom of decline. And yet, since the commencement of the 
great Tertiary division, series of shells, as hardy, appar- 
ently, as Cyprina, have in succession come into being, and 
then ceased to be. The period over which we have passed 
includes generations of species. But there was space 
enough for them all in the bygone eternity. It has some- 
times appeared to me as if, from our own weak inability 
to conceive of the upper reaches of that awful tide of 
continuity which had no beginning, and of which the 
measured shreds and fragments constitute time, we had 
become jealous lest even God Himself should have wrought 
in it during other than a brief and limited space, with 
which our small faculties could easily grapple. 

"Oh, who can strive 
To comprehend the vast, the awful truth 
Of the eternity that hath gone by, 
And not recoil from the dismaying sense 
Of human impotence! The life of man 
Is summed in birthdays and in sepulchres, 
But the eternal God had no beginning." 

There are two great infinites, — the infinite in space 
and the infinite in time. It were well, surely, to be hum- 
ble enough to acknowledge it accordant to all analogy, 
that as He who inhabits eternity has filled the one limit- 
less void — that of space — with world upon world and 
system upon system, far beyond the reach of human ken, 
He should also have wrought in the other limitless world 
— that of time — for age after age, and period after period, 
far beyond the reach of human conception. 



LECTURE FOURTH. 

The Continuity of Existence twice broken in Geological History — The Three 
great Geological Divisions representative of three independent Orders of Ex- 
istences — Origin of the Wealden in England — Its great Depth and High 
Antiquity — The question whether the Weald Formation belongs to the Creta- 
ceous or the Oolitic System determined in favor of the latter by its Position in 
Scotland — Its Organisms, consisting of both Salt and Fresh Water Animals, 
indicative of its Fluviatile Origin, but in proximity to the Ocean — The Out- 
liers of the Weald in Morayshire — Their Organisms — The Sabbath- Stone of the 
Northumberland Coal Pits — Origin of its Name — The Framework of Scot- 
land — The Conditions under which it may have been formed — The Lias and 
the Oolite produced by the last great Upheaval of its Northern Mountains — 
The Line of Elevation of the Lowland Counties — Localities of the Oolitic 
Deposits of Scotland — Its Flora and Fauna — History of one of its Pine 
Trees — Its Animal Organisms — A Walk into the Wilds of the Oolite Hills of 
Sutherland. 

The mystic thread, with its three strands of black, 
white, and gray, spun by the sybil in " Guy Mannering," 
formed, she said, a "full hank, but not a haill ane:" the 
lengthened tale of years which it symbolized " was thrice 
broken and thrice to asp." I have sometimes thought of 
that wonderfully mingled and variously colored thread of 
existence which descends from the earliest periods known 
to the geologist clown to our own times, as not unaptly 
represented by that produced on this occasion from the 
spindle of the gipsy. We find, in its general tissue, species 
interlaced with and laying hold of species, as, in the thread, 
fibre is interlaced with and lays hold of fibre; and as by 
this arrangement the fibres, though not themselves continu- 
ous, but of very limited length, form a continuous cord, so 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 169 

species of limited duration, that at certain parts in the 
course of time began to be, and at certain other parts 
became extinct, form throughout immensely extended 
periods a continuous cord of existence. New species had 
come into being ere the old ones dropped away and disap- 
peared ; and there occurred for long ages no break or 
hiatus in the course, just as in the human family there 
occurs no abrupt break or hiatus, from the circumstance 
that new generations come upon the stage ere the old 
ones make their final exit. But in the geological thread, 
as in that of the sybil, the continuity is twice abruptly 
broken, and the thread itself divided, in consequence, into 
three parts. It is continuous from the present time up to 
the commencement of the Tertiary period; and then so 
abrupt a break occurs, that, with the exception of the 
microscopic diatomaceae, to which I last evening referred, 
and of one shell and one coral, not a single species crosses 
the gap. On its farther or remoter side, however, where 
the Secondary division closes, the intermingling of species 
again begins, and runs on till the commencement of this 
great Secondary division; and then, just where the Pa- 
laeozoic division closes, we find another abrupt break, 
crossed, if crossed at all, — for there still exists some doubt 
on the subject, — by but two species of plant. 1 And then, 
from the farther side of this second gap the thread of 
being continues unbroken, until we find it terminating 
with the first beginnings of life upon our planet. Why 
these strange gaps should occur, — why the long descend- 
ing cord of organic existence should be thus mysteriously 
broken in three, — we know not yet, and never may ; but, 

1 For a reference to the research of the last two years, which has been 
busily at work upon this precise epoch, see Preface. 

15 



170 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

like the division into books and chapters of some great 
work on natural history, such as that of Cuvier or Buffon, 
it serves to break up the whole according to an intelligible 
plan, the scheme of which we may, in part at least, aspire 
to comprehend. The three great divisions of the geol- 
ogist, — Tertiary, Secondary, and Palaeozoic, — of which 
these two chasms, with beginnings of life on the one hand, 
and the present state of things on the other, form the 
terminal limits, — represent each, if I may so express my- 
self, an independent dynasty or empire. Under certain 
qualifications, to which I shall afterwards refer, the Ter- 
tiary division represents the dynasty of the mammal ; the 
Secondary division the dynasty of the reptile; and the 
Palaeozoic division the dynasty of the fish. Each of the 
divisions, too, has a special type or characteristic fashion 
of its own ; so that the aspect of its existences differs as 
much in the group from the aspect of the existences of 
each of the others, as if they had been groups belonging 
to different planets. The vegetable and animal organisms 
of the planet Venus may not differ more from those of the 
planet Mars, or those of Mars from the organisms of the 
planet Jupiter, than the existences of the Tertiary division 
differ from those of the Secondary one, or those of the Sec- 
ondary one from the existences of the Palaeozoic division. 
Beneath the two great divisions of the Cretaceous sys- 
tem, and consequently of more ancient date, there occurs 
in the sister kingdom an important series of beds, chiefly 
of lacustrine or fluviatile origin, known as the Wealden. 
Before the submergence of what are now the south-eastern 
parts of England, first beneath the comparatively shallow 
sea of the Greensand, and then beneath the profounder 
depths of the ocean of the Chalk, a mighty river, the drain- 
age of some unknown continent, seems to have flowed for 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 171 

many ages along these parts of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, 
known as the Valley of the Weald. The banks of this 
old nameless river were covered with forests of coniferous 
trees of the Pine and Araucarian families, with cycadese 
and ferns, and were haunted by gigantic reptiles, herbiv- 
orous and carnivorous, some of which rivalled in bulk the 
mammoth and the elephant; its waters were inhabited by 
amphibiae of the same great class, chiefly crocodiles and 
chelonians of extinct species and type ; by numerous fishes, 
too, of the old ganoid order; and by shells whose families, 
and even genera, still exist in our pools and rivers, though 
the species be all gone. Winged reptiles, too, occasionally 
flitted amid its woods, or sped over its broad bosom; and 
insects of the same family as that to which our dragon flies 
belong spent the first two stages of their existence at the 
bottom of its pools and shallows, and the terminal one in 
darting over it on their wings of delicate gauze in quest of 
their prey. It is stated by Dr. Mantell, our highest author- 
ity on the subject of the Weald, that the delta of this 
great river is about two thousand feet in thickness, — a 
thickness w T hich quadruples that of the delta of the Mis- 
sissippi. There can be little doubt that the American 
"Father of Waters" is a very ancient river; and yet it 
would seem that this river of the Wealden, which has now 
existed for myriads of ages in but its fossilized remains, 
hidden under the Wolds of Surrey and Kent, — this old 
river, which flowed over where the ocean of the Oolite 
once had been, and in turn gave place and was overflowed 
by the ocean of the Chalk, — continued to roll its down- 
ward waters amid forests as dense and as thickly inhabited 
as those of the great American valley, during a period per- 
haps four times as extended. 

Compared with the English formation of the Weald, 



172 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

which extends over a wide, and what was at one time a 
very rude district, our beds of the Scotch Wealden are but 
of little depth, and limited extent. And yet they serve to 
throw a not unimportant light on the true character and 
place of the formation. It occurs in England, as I have 
said, between two great marine systems, — the Cretaceous 
and the Oolitic ; and the question has arisen, to which of 
these systems does it belong? Now, our Scotch beds of 
the Weald determine the question. They make their ap- 
pearance, not at the top of Oolitic deposits, as in England, 
but intercalated throughout the system, — occurring in the 
Isle of Skye, where they were first detected many years 
ago by Sir Roderick Murchison, immediately under the 
Oxford clay, a bed of the Middle Oolite ; and at Brora, 
where they were first detected a few twelvemonths since 
by Mr. Robertson of Elgin, in pretty nearly the same me- 
dial position, and where what is known as the great Oolite 
occurs. Three years ago I had the pleasure of detecting 
a bed of the same lacustrine or estuary character, and 
bearing many of the characteristic marks of the Weald, 
greatly lower still, — lower, indeed, than any fresh-water 
deposit of the Secondary division in Britain. I found it 
occurring not forty yards over the bottom of the Lias, — 
the formation which constitutes the base of the Oolitic 
system. In Morayshire the Weald occurs in the form 
of outliers, that rise, as at Linksfield, in the immediate 
neighborhood of Elgin, into low swelling hills, resting on 
the Old Red Sandstone of the district, and so thoroughly 
insulated from every other rock of the same age, that they 
have reminded me of detached hillocks of debris and ashes 
shot down on the surface of some ancient moor by some 
painstaking farmer, who had contemplated bringing the 
waste under subjection to the plough. But though value- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 173 

less, from their detached character, for determining the 
place of the formation, they serve better than the inter- 
calated beds of Ross, Skye, and Sutherland, to establish 
by their animal remains the palaeontological identity of the 
Scotch with the English Wealden. 

Rather more than twelve years ago, the late Dr. John 
Malcolmson, of Madras, — a zealous and accomplished ge- 
ologist, too early lost to science and his friends, — brought 
with him, when on a visit to the Continent, several speci- 
mens of ichthyic remains from a Morayshire deposit, and 
submitted them to Agassiz. "Permit me," said the natur- 
alist, " to find out for myself the formation to which they 
belong." He passed hand and eye over tooth and spine, 
plate and bone, and at length set his finger on a single 
scale of rhomboidal form and brightly enamelled surface. 
"Some of these teeth," he said, "belong to the genus Hvbo- 
dus, but the species are new, and the genus itself has a wide 
range. Here, however, is something more determinate. 
This scale belongs to the Lepidotus minor, or ichthyolite 
of the Weald, and one of the most characteristic fishes 
of the great fresh-water formation of Surrey and Kent." 
The fossils on which the distinguished ichthyologist thus 
promptly, and, as it proved, correctly decided, had been 
collected by Mr. Malcolmson from the Wealden outlier 
at Linksfield ; and the ichthyolite which he so specially 
singled out — the Lepidotus — seems to have been a 
fresh-water fish of the nearly extinct ganoid order, and 
more nearly akin to the Lepidosteus of the North Ameri- 
can rivers and lakes than to any other fish that now exists. 
By much the greater number of its contemporaries in the 
deposit also belonged to lakes and rivers. Some of the 
limestone slabs are thickly covered over by fresh-water 
shells, 'of types very much akin to those which still occur 

1-5* 



174 LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 

in our pools and ditches, such as Planorbis and Paludina. 
It presents also beds of a fresh-water mussel akin to a 
mussel of the English Weald, — Mytilus Lyellii / and it 
so abounds in the remains of those minute, one-eyed crus- 
taceans known as the Cyprides, that the vast numbers of 
their egg-shaped shelly cases give to some of the beds a 
structure resembling the roe of a fish. It contains, too, 
bones of a species of tortoise, and several other decidedly 
fresh-water remains ; while another class of its organisms 
serve to show that it was occasionally visited by denizens 
of the sea. It has furnished specimens of bones and teeth 
of Plesiosaurus, — a marine reptile ; and some of the upper 
beds contain a small oyster; while a class of its remains, 
— the teeth and huge dorsal spines of Hybodonts, an ex- 
tinct family of sharks, — though they may have been fitted 
to sustain life in brackish water, seem to indicate rather a 
sea than a lacustrine or river habitat. The deposit took 
place in all probability in the upper reaches of an estuary 
operated upon by the tides, and at one time fresh and at 
another brackish, and where, in a certain debatable tract, 
the fishes, reptiles, and shells of the river met and mingled 
with the fishes, reptiles, and shells of the sea. I may men- 
tion, that in the immediate neighborhood of the fresh-water 
or Weald beds, intercalated, as in Ross and Sutherland, 
with the marine deposits of the Lias or Oolite, there al- 
ways occur beds of a species of shell which, though it ex- 
hibits internally a peculiar structure of hinge, unlike any- 
other known to the conchologist, bears externally very 
much the appearance of a mytilus or mussel. It seems to 
have lived in brackish water, and to have marked a tran- 
sition stage between the marine and lacustrine, — the salt 
and the fresh ; for immediately under or over it, as the 
case occurs, the explorer is ever sure to find productions of 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 175 

the land or of fresh water, — lake or river shells, such as 
cyclas or paludina, or portions of terrestrial plants, and oc- 
casionally of fresh-water tortoises. This transition shell is 
known as the Pern a. These notices you will, I am afraid, 
deem tediously minute ; but they indulge us with at least 
a glimpse of a portion of what is now our country during 
an immensely extended period, of which no other record 
exists. Where some nameless river enters the sea, we de- 
termine, as through a thick fog, which conceals the line of 
banks on either hand, that the waters swarm with life, rep- 
tilian and ichthyic : the glossy scales of the river LepidoUis 
gleam bright through the depths ; while the shark-like 
Hybodus from the distant ocean shows above the surface 
his long dorsal fin, armed with its thorny sj}ine ; and over 
beds of shells of mingled character, a carnivorous fresh- 
water tortoise, akin to the fierce Trionyx of the southern 
parts of North America, meets with the scarce more form- 
idable sea-born Plesiosaurus. 

In these Morayshire outliers of the Weald we first find 
in situ in our country (for we need scarce take into account 
the Tertiary beds of Mull), fossiliferous deposits that have 
been converted into solid rock ; and certainly the appear- 
ance of some of the sections is such as to awaken curiosity. 
In the section of Linksfield, in the neighborhood of Elgin, 
though the thickness of the deposit does not exceed forty 
feet, there occur numerous alternations of argillaceous and 
calcareous beds, differing from each other in color and 
quality, and not unfrequently in their fossils also ; and each 
of which evidently represents a state of things which ob- 
tained during the period of their deposition, distinct from 
the preceding and succeeding states. 1 Strata of gray, 

1 Fielding, in his "Voyage to Lisbon (1754)," gives an account of an 
inaccessible bank of mud which stretched at low water between the shore 



176 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

green, blue, and almost black clays, alternate with beds of 
light green, light brown, gray, and almost black limestones; 
and such is the effect, when a first section is opened in the 
deposit, as sometimes happens to facilitate the working of 
a limestone quarry below, that one is reminded, by the 
variety and peculiar tone of the colors, of the inlaid work 
of an old-fashioned cabinet made of the tinted woods which 
were in such common use about two centuries ago. Some 
of these bands seem, from their contents, to be of fresh 
water ; some of marine origin ; one bed nearly four feet in 
thickness is composed almost exclusively of the shelly 
coverings of a minute crustacean, — Cypris globosa, — not 
half the size of a small pin-head; one is strewed over with 
the teeth of sharks ; one with the plates and scales of 
ganoidal fishes ; in one a small mussel is exceedingly 
abundant; another contains the shells of Planorbis and 
Paludina ; in this layer we find a small oyster, which must 
have lived in the sea ; in that, a Cyclas, the inhabitant of 
a lake ; here the plates of a river tortoise ; there the bones 
of the marine Plesiosaur. Of all the many-colored strata 
of which the deposit consists, there is not one which does 
not speak of that law of change of which the poet, as if in 
anticipation of the discoveries of modern science, sings so 
philosophically and well : 

Of chance or change, oh .' let not man complain, 
Else shall he never, never cease to wail ; 

at Ryde and the sea. " Between the shore and the sea," he says, " there 
is at low water an impassable gulf of deep mud, which can neither be 
traversed by walking or swimming, so that for near one-half of the twenty- 
four hours Ryde is inaccessible by friend or foe." The same tract now is 
occupied by an expanse of firm white sand, which forms excellent bathing 
ground; but immediately under, at the depth of from eighteen inches to 
two feet, the mud of Fielding's days is found occurring as a dark-colored 
impalpable silt. 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 177 

For from the imperial dome, to where the swain 
Rears the lone cottage in the silent dale, 
All feel the assault of Fortune's fickle gale; 
Art, empire, earth itself, to change are doomed: 
Earthquakes have raised to heaven the humble vale, 
And gulfs the mountain's mighty mass entombed; 
And where the Atlantic rolls, wide continents have bloomed. 

Regarded, too, as the record of, if I may so express my- 
self a party-colored time, these party-colored layers are of 
no little interest. There forms in the recesses of the 
Northumbrian coal-pits a party-colored clay, consisting of 
gray and black layers, which, from a certain peculiarity to 
which I shall immediately advert, bears the name of Sab- 
bath-stone. The springs which ooze into the pits are 
charged with a fine impalpable pipe-clay, which they 
deposit in the pools and waters of the deserted workings, 
and which is of a pale gray color approaching to white. 
When the miners are at work, however, a light black dust, 
struck by their tools from the coal, and carried by cur- 
rents of air into the recesses of the mine, is deposited 
along with it; and, in consequence, each day's work is 
marked by a thin black layer in the mass, while each 
night during which there is a cessation of labor, is repre- 
sented by a pale layer, which exhibits the color natural to 
the clay. And when a cross section of the substance 
thus deposited comes to be made, every week of regular 
employment is found to be represented by a group of six 
black streaks closely lined off on a pale ground, and each 
Sabbath by a broad pale streak interposed between each 
group, — exactly such a space, in short, as a clerk, in keep- 
ing tally, would leave between his fiigots of strokes. In 
this curious record a holiday takes its place among the 
working days, like a second Sabbath. "How comes this 
week to have two Sabbaths ? " inquired a gentleman to 



178 LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 

whom a specimen was shown at one of the pits. " That 
blank Friday," replied the foreman, "was the day of the 
races." — "And what," said the visitor, "means this large 
empty space, a full fortnight in breadth and more?"—" O, 
that space," rejoined the foreman, "shows the time of the 
strike for wages : the men stood out for three weeks, and 
then gave in." In fine, the Sabbath-stone of the Nor- 
thumbrian mines is a sort of geologic register of the work 
done in them, — a sort of natural tally, in which the sedi- 
mentary agent keeps the chalk, and which tells when the 
miners labor and when they rest, and whether they keep 
their Sabbaths intact or encroach upon them. One would 
scarce expect to find of transactions so humble a record in 
the heart of a stone ; but it may serve to show how very 
curious that narrative might be, could we but read it 
aright, which lies couched in the party-colored layers of 
the Morayshire Wealden. All its many beds, green, 
black, and gray, argillaceous and calcareous, record the 
workings of nature, with her alternations of repose, in a 
time of frequent vicissitude, and amid its annals of chem- 
ical and mechanical change embody in many an episo- 
dical little passage its exhibitions of anatomical structure 
and its anecdotes of animal life. 

Before passing on to the Oolite, as developed in Scot- 
land, or rather to our Scotch deposits of the marine 
Oolite, — for what we call our Wealden is, as I have 
shown, merely an estuary or lacustrine Oolite, — let me 
solicit your attention to a few points illustrative of what 
may be termed the framework of our country. There are 
two sets of conditions under which land may arise from 
the ocean. Its hills and plateaus may be formed by the 
subterranean forces violently thrusting them up, like vast 
wedges, through the general crust of the earth, and high 



LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 179 

over the ocean level; or it may be brought up to the light 
and air en masse by a general elevation over wide areas 
of the unbroken crust itself; or land may again sink 
under these two sets of conditions : it may sink in conse- 
quence of a breaking up and prostration of its framework 
to the average level of the crust, — of a striking back, 
if I may so speak, of the protruded wedges; or it may 
sink in consequence of a general depression over a wide 
area of the portion of the crust on which its framework is 
erected. Thus Scotland might disappear under the waves, 
either by some violent earthquake convulsion that would 
strike down its hills and table-lands to the general level 
of the earth's crust, and of consequence wholly destroy its 
contour; or it might disappear through a gentle sinking 
of the area that it occupies, which would leave its general 
contour unchanged. Were there a depression to take place 
where it now rises, of but one foot in five hundred over 
an area a thousand miles square, its highest mountain 
summits would be buried beneath the sea, and yet the 
contour of the submerged land would remain almost iden- 
tically what it is, — its hills would retain the same relative 
elevation over its valleys, and its higher table-lands over 
its lower plains. Now, in the later ages of its history, — 
in those ages, for instance, in which the ice-laden ocean of 
the boulder-clay rose high along its hill-sides, and it ex- 
isted as a wintry archipelago of islands, — there seems to 
have taken place scarce any change in its framework : the 
depressions through which it sank, and the elevations 
through which it rose, seem to have been dej)ressions 
and elevations of area; and, whether under or over the 
waves, it continued to retain its general contour. The 
last great change which affected its framework, and gave 
to it a different profile in relation to the general surface of 



180 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

the globe from that which it had borne in the earlier ages, 
— the change which thrust up its latest-born lines of 
mountains like wedges through the earth's crust, — was 
a change which took place a little posterior to that period 
of its history at which I am now arrived. We find that 
its last lines of hills disturbed and bore up with them 
deposits of the Lias and of the Oolite, but of no later 
formations. The gigantic Ben Nevis and his Anakirn 
brethren of the same group were raising their heads 
and shoulders through the earth's crust, to form the future 
landmarks of our country, shortly after the period when 
the river Lepidoids of the Wealden were disporting in 
the same brackish tract with the Hybodont sharks of its 
seas, and its fresh-water Chelonians and marine Plesiosauri 
met and intermingled in the same neutral rocks of es- 
tuary. 

The last great paroxysm of upheaval among our Scot- 
tish mountains seems to have operated in lines that trav- 
ersed the country diagonally from nearly south-west by 
south to north-east by north, — the line indicated by that 
of the great Caledonian Valley. We find a northern 
district of considerable extent ploughed in this direction 
by the great parallel glens traversed by the Spey, the 
Findhorn, the Nairn, and the Ness. The northern shore 
of the Moray Frith, too, with that remarkable line of hills 
which includes the Sutors of Cromarty, pertains to this 
system, as also the higher mountain range which rises 
along the coast of Sutherland, and to which the Ord Hill 
of Caithness belongs. These lines of hills, wherever they 
have come in contact — as along the shores of the Moray 
Frith — with beds of the Lias and Oolite, have disturbed 
and tilted up, at a steep angle, their edges. The hill of 
Eathie, in the neighborhood of Cromarty, — a hill of the 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 181 

series in which the two Sutors- occur, — has at one place 
borne up the Lower Lias on its flanks at an angle of eighty; 
and among the rocks of the Northern Sutor there is a tall 
precipice of the Old Red Sandstone, with an uptilted 
deposit of the Lias at its base, whose abrupt, dizzy front, 
once the haunt of the eagle, and still that of the blue 
hawk, was evidently, ere the elevation of the series, part 
of the horizontal platform on which the first Liassic stra- 
tum had been deposited. What was a flat submarine bot- 
tom then, is a steep ivy-mantled precipice now. Across 
the long deep valleys and mountain ridges of this last line 
of upheaval in Scotland, — the line to which Ben Nevis, 
Milfourveny, and the Ord Hill of Caithness belong, and 
whose period of elevation a high Continental authority, 
Elie de Beaumont, regards as identical with that of the 
Mont Pilas and Cote d'Or of France, — we find a greatly 
less continuous, because more interrupted and broken, set of 
ridges, running in a nearly westerly direction. The friths 
of Dornoch, Cromarty, and Beauly, with all the bays 
of Munlochy and Urquhart, Loch Oich and Loch Eil, 
which all strike westwards across the country from off the 
great diagonal trench of the Caledonian Valley, indicate 
the direction of this second and earlier line of upheaval. 
I say earlier line. The hills of the diagonal Ben Nevis 
line disturbed and broke up the Oolite, whereas the hills 
of the transverse, or, as I may term it, Ben Weavis line, 
disturbed and bore up with them nothing more modern 
than the Old Red Sandstone. I have described the 
northern part of the kingdom as consisting of a great 
Primary nucleus, surrounded by strata, more or less 
broken, of Old Red Sandstone, Lias, and Oolite. 1 Let 

1 To which is to be now added Silurian. 
16 



182 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

us now further conceive of that nucleus as a stony field, 
that had been first ploughed across and fretted into deep 
furrows and steep mountainous ridges, and then in an after 
period ploughed diagonally, so as partially to efface the 
former ploughing, so that only in the direction of the last 
ploughing do the ridges and furrows remain tolerably 
entire, — let us, I say, conceive of such a ploughed field, 
and we will have a tolerably adequate conception, so far 
as it goes, of the framework of at least the northern 
portion of Scotland. In the southern part of the king- 
dom there is yet another line of elevation exhibited, 
whose direction from nearly north-east to south-west we 
find indicated by the nearly parallel lines in which the 
greater formations of the Lowland counties, from the clay- 
states that flank the Grampians, to the Grauwackes of the 
border districts, sweep across the country. I fear that the 
homely illustrations which I have to employ in rendering 
my subject comprehensible, — such as wedges struck up- 
wards from below, — a field first ploughed across and then 
diagonally, — may have the effect of so reducing my sub- 
ject in your minds into a mere model, that, through the 
necessary reduction, more may be lost in expansiveness of 
feeling than gained by any substitution of clearness of 
view. There can be little doubt that in the conceptions 
of mind, as in the collocations of matter, the portable 
means the small ; and that Goethe exercised his wonted 
shrewdness in remarking, that when the ancients spoke 
of the immeasurable earth and the illimitable sea, it was 
with a profounder feeling than any now exercised by the 
geographer in a time when every school-girl can tell that 
the world is round. You will, however, remember, that 
though my illustrations are small, my subject is large; and 
such of my audience as have sailed over the profound 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 183 

depths of Loch Ness, — depths greatly more profound than 
those of the German Ocean beyond, — and seen those 
lines of russet mountains, so often capped with cloud, and 
so often, even at midsummer, streaked with snow, — that 
rise on either hand, and that inclose from sea to sea that 
mighty trench which the old unsophisticated Highlander 
learned to distinguish as the great Glen of Albyn, — when 
they call up to memory the noble features of the scene, — 
the long retiring vista on either hand, purple in the far 
distance, and remember that that vast rectilinear hollow 
forms but one of the plough furrows of my illustration, — 
they will see that that with which I am in reality deal- 
ing is the sublime of nature, and that even the details 
of my subject, rightly appreciated, are not suited to lower 
our conceptions of the wonderful workings of old of Him 
who, by processes which science is but now aspiring to 
comprehend, "gathered the waters together into on^e place, 
*hat the dry land might appear," and laid the deep-seated 
-oundation of the mighty hills. 

Let us now pass to the Oolite proper, and its base the 
Lias, as we find them developed in Scotland. They form 
but a comparatively small portion of the surface of the 
country, — not much more, it has been estimated, than 
*rixty square miles; nor can I refer definitely to any 
marked peculiarity of scenery in the districts in which 
they occur. The Oolites of "Sutherland extend westwards 
=md southwards from the Ord Hill of Caithness to the 
village of Golspie, a distance of about sixteen miles ; and 
form, under the rugged line of hills against whose flanks 
"they recline, a green narrow strip of low country, that, 
where not too deeply covered up by debris of the Primary 
rocks, transported from the interior during the Pleistocene 
period, is, for its extent, of great agricultural value, and 



184 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

bears on its cultured surface the rich fields and extensive 
woods of Dunrobin, the stately castle of the old earls of 
Sutherland. Further to the west and south, along the 
eastern shores of Cromarty and Ross, detached patches of 
the Lias occur, as at Shandwick, at the Northern Sutor 
of Cromarty, at the Southern Sutor, and at the Hill of 
Eathie, — each patch occurring directly opposite, and lean- 
ing against, one of the upheaved hills, which, as I have 
already said, were undoubtedly the agents in raising and 
bringing it to the surface. The Lias and Oolite also ap- 
pear on the southern side of the Moray Frith, in the 
counties of Moray and Banff, but merely as outliers of 
very limited extent, and sorely broken up or ground down 
by the denuding Pleistocene agencies. On the western 
coast of Scotland the Lias may be seen on the mainland 
at Applecross, and on the sides of Loch Aline, opposite 
the Sound of Mull ; while in the inner Hebrides, it forms, 
with the Oolite, though greatly overflown by trap, the 
base of the larger part of the island of Mull, of two of 
the Small Isles, Eigg and Muck, of Raza and Scalpa, and 
of large tracts of the eastern and northern half of Skye. 
At Broadford, in the latter island, the Lias forms the 
whole of the rich level islet of Pabba, which, lying as 
at anchor in its quiet bay, reminds one, from its prevail- 
ing color and form, of one of the low, green steamboats 
of the Clyde. Opposite Pabba, the Liassic deposit sweeps 
across the mainland of Skye from sea to sea, along a flat 
valley some two or three miles wide ; but while the mi- 
nute Liassic islet resembles, from the softness of its out- 
line, an islet of England set down in a hill-enclosed bay 
of the Scottish Highlands, there is nothing English in the 
scenic character of the Liassic valley. It is a brown and 
sombre expanse of marsh and moor, studded by blue, 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 185 

flreary lochans, interesting, however, to the botanist, as 
the habitats of the rare Eriocaidon septangulare. The 
waste is haunted, too, say the Highlanders, by Ludag, a 
malignant goblin, not more known elsewhere in Europe 
than the rare plant that in the last age used to be seen 
at dusk hopping with immense hops on its one leg, — for, 
unlike every other denizen of the supernatural world, it is 
not furnished with two, — and that, enveloped in rags, 
and with fierce misery in its hollow eye, has dealt heavy 
blows, it is said, on the cheeks of benighted travellers. 
Certainly a more appropriate spectre could scarce be sum- 
moned to walk at nights over the entombed remains of 
the old monsters of the Lias than one-legged Ludag, the 
goblin of the wastes of Broadford. Such, in brief, is a 
summary of our Oolitic deposits. They occupy, as I have 
said, but a small portion of the surface of Scotland ; and, 
though coal has occasionally been wrought in them, and 
though they furnish in several localities supplies of lime 
and of building stone, their economic importance is com- 
paratively small. But a well-filled volume — the life- 
long work of some laborious chronicler — may have no 
economic importance in the lower and humbler sense, 
^and may yet form a valuable record of bygone transac- 
tions and events suited to delight and instruct throughout 
all generations. And it is thus with the Oolitic deposits 
of Scotland. Their innumerable strata, closely written 
" within and without " in a language in which every 
character is an organism, form the leaves of a record in 
which many of the marvellous existences that flourished 
during what are geologically the middle ages of our coun- 
try's history are well and wonderfully preserved. Instead 
of dissipating your attention by describing at length the 
fossils of its various deposits, I shall attempt giving you 

16* 



186 LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 

a general idea of the whole under the ordinary division 
of animal and vegetable, as they have come to my knowl- 
edge during the researches of at least thirty years. 

In one of its features Oolitic flora of what is now Scot- 
land must have resembled its flora in the present, or rather 
in the past age, ere our native pine-woods had yielded to 
the axe. Trees of the fir or pine division of the Coniferaa, 
many of them of slow growth and large size, must have 
formed huge forests in a province of the land of the Oolite 
which extended from what is now the island of Mull to 
the Ord Hill of Caithness. The Scuir of Eigg, a subaerial 
mole of columnar pitchstone, four hundred feet in height, 
and perched on the ridge of a tall hill, rests on the remains 
of a prostrated forest, as some of our submarine moles rest 
on foundations of piles. And of this forest all the trees 
seem to have consisted of one species, — a conifer of the 
Oolite now known to the fossil botanist as the JPinites 
Eiggensis, or Eigg pine. Branches and portions of the 
trunks of a similar pine are not unfrequent in the Lias of 
Eathie and Ross ; and in shale-beds of the Lower Oolite 
in the neighborhood of Helmsdale there occur in abun- 
dance fossil trunks and branches, mingled with cones and 
the narrow spiky leaflets characteristic of the family. I 
have reckoned in the transverse section of a Helmsdale 
pine-trunk about two feet in diameter, more than a hun- 
dred annual rings. And from the rings and roots of some 
of the others, its contemporaries, I found that curious 
insight might be derived respecting the state and condi- 
tion of vegetable life in the old Scotch woods of the 
Oolite. In the first place, the annual rings themselves 
told me, when exposed to transmitted light in the micro- 
scope, that the winters of that time gave vegetation as 
decided a check as our winters now. The tender woody 



LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 187 

cells were first dwarfed and thickened in their formation 
by the strengthening of the autumnal cold, and then for 
a season they ceased to form altogether. But then the 
spring came, and over the hard concentric line drawn by 
the chill hand of winter they began to form themselves 
anew in full-sized luxuriance; and thus, year after year, 
and for century after century, the process went on. Some 
of these ancient pine-trees grew in rich sheltered hollows, 
and acquired bulk so rapidly, that they increased their 
diameter eight and a half inches in twenty years ; others 
grew so slowly, that they increased their diameter only 
two and a half inches in forty years. And it is a curious 
circumstance, that in both those of slower and of more 
rapid growth we find alternating groups of broader and 
narrower annual rings, indicating apparently groups of bet- 
ter and worse seasons. Lord Bacon remarks in one of his 
Essays, — the Essay on the Vicissitude of Things, — that 
it was a circumstance first observed in the Low Countries 
(the provinces of the Netherlands), that there were cer- 
tain meteorological cycles of seasons — groups of warmer 
and groups of colder summers, and of more temperate and 
of less temperate winters — which periodically came round 
again. And we have seen not very successful attempts 
made in our own times to measure these cycles, and reduce 
them to a formula, from which the nature of the coming 
seasons might be determined beforehand. But there can 
be little doubt — whatever the cause or the order of their 
occurrence — that alternations of groups of colder and 
warmer, better and worse seasons, do occur ; and it seems 
more than probable that, in obedience to some occult law, 
as little understood in the present age as when its opera- 
tions were first detected in the Netherlands, Scotland had 
in the times of the Oolite, as certainly as now, its alter' 



180 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

nating groups of chill and of genial summers, and of tem- 
perate and severe winters. And the well-marked rings of 
its fossil Coniferae remain to attest the fact. We can even 
determine the kind of soil into which a certain proportion 
of these ancient pines struck root. It was extremely shal- 
low in some localities, and lay over a hard bottom. We 
find that some of the fossil stumps shot out their roots 
horizontally immediately as they entered the earth, and 
sent down no vertical prolongations of the trunk into the 
subsoil, — an arrangement still common among the roots 
of trees planted on a shallow stratum of soil resting on a 
hard bottom. Further, we are still able to ascertain that 
the hard bottom that underlay the soil in which some of 
the Oolitic pines of Helmsdale grew was composed of Old 
Red flagstone, identical in its mineral composition and 
organic remains with what is now known as Caithness 
flag. 

But let us trace the history of a single pine-tree of the 
Oolite, as indicated by its petrified remains. This gnarled 
and twisted trunk once anchored its roots amid the cran- 
nies of a precipice of dark-gray sandstone, that rose over 
some nameless stream of the Oolite, in what is now the 
north of Scotland. The rock, which, notwithstanding its 
dingy color, was a deposit of the Lower Old Red Sand- 
stone, formed a member of the fish-beds of that system, 
— beds that were charged then, as now, with numerous 
fossils, as strange and obsolete in the creation of the Oolite 
as in the creation which at present exists. It was a firm, 
undestructible stone, covered by a thin, barren soil; and 
the twisted rootlets of the pine, rejected and thrown back- 
wards from its more solid planes, had to penetrate into its 
narrow fissures for a straitened and meagre subsistence. 
The tree grew but slowly : in considerably more than half 



LECTUKES ON GEOLOGY. 189 

a century it had attained to a diameter of little more than 
ten inches a foot over the soil ; and its bent and twisted 
form gave evidence of the life of hardship to which it was 
exposed. It was, in truth, a picturesque rag of a tree, that 
for the first few feet twisted itself round like an overborne 
wrestler struggling to escape from under his enemy, and 
then struck out an abrupt angle, and stretched itself like 
a bent arm over the stream. It must have resembled, on 
its bald eminence, that pine-tree of a later time described 
by Scott, that high above " ash and oak," 

" Cast anchor in the rifted rock, * 

And o'er the giddy chasm hung 
His shattered trunk, and frequent flung, 
Where seemed the cliffs to meet on high, 
His boughs athwart the narrowed sky." 

The seasons passed over it : every opening spring gave its 
fringe of tenderer green to its spiky foliage, and every 
returning autumn saw it shed its cones into the stream 
below. Many a delicate fern sprang up and decayed 
around its gnarled and fantastic root, single-leaved and 
simple of form, like the Scolopendria of our caverns and 
rock recesses, or fretted into many a slim pinnate leaflet, 
like the minute maiden-hair or the graceful lady-fern. 
Flying reptiles have perched amid its boughs ; the light- 
winged dragon-fly has darted on wings of gauze through 
the openings of its lesser twigs ; the tortoise and the lizard 
have hybernated during the chills of winter amid the hol- 
lows of its roots; for many years it formed one of the 
minor features in a wild picturesque scene, on which hu- 
man eye never looked ; and at length, touched by decay, 
its upper branches began to wither and bleach white in 
the winds of heaven ; when shaken by a sudden hurricane 
that came roaring adown the ravine, the mass of rock in 



100 LECTURES 0^ GEOLOGY. 

which it had been anchored at once gave way, and, bear- 
ing fast jammed among its roots a fragment of the mass 
which we still find there, and from which we read a por- 
tion of its story, it was precipitated into the foaming toi\ 
rent. Dancing on the eddies, or lingering amid the pools, 
or shooting, arrow-like, adown the rapids, it at length finds 
its way to the sea ; and after sailing over beds of massive 
coral, — the ponderous Isastrea and more delicate Tham- 
nastrea, — and after disturbing the Enaliosaur and Belem- 
nite in their deep-green haunts, it sinks, saturated with 
waj;er, into a bed of arenaceous mud, to make its appear- 
ance, after long ages, in the world of man, — a marble 
mummy of the old Oolite forests, — and to be curiously 
interrogated regarding its character and history. 

The pines of our Scotch Oolite — some of them, as I 
have shown, or rather as my specimens show, of exceed- 
ingly slow growth — are suggestive of a temperate, if not" 
severe climate. The family of their contemporaries, how- 
ever, to which I must next refer as not less characteristic 
of the flora of this ancient time than the coniferae them- 
selves, is now to be found in a state of nature in only the 
warmer regions of the earth, and can be studied in this 
part of the world in but our conservatories and green- 
houses. It is known to the botanist as the Cycadaceous 
family ; and at least two of its genera, Cycas and Zamia, 
we find well represented in the Oolitic deposits of Scot- 
land. In the Zamia, a cylindrical, squat, scale-covered 
pedestal is fringed along its upper edge by a ring of long 
pinnate leaves, that radiate outwards like the spokes of a 
wheel from the nave ; and, placed on the centre of the 
pedestal, there is, when the plant is in fruit, a handsome 
cone. The tout ensemble is as if a pine-apple, with the 
pot in which it grew, and with its leaves arranged like a 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 191 

ruff round its stem, formed altogether but one plant. The 
Cycas is usually taller than Zamia; the leaves also, of 
the compound pinnate character, are smaller and more 
bushy; and it resembles, as a whole, a decapitated palm, 
with a coronal of fern bound atop, as if to conceal the 
mutilation. With these Cycadacae there flourished in the 
marshes of the period plants of a family still widely spread 
over the various climatal zones, but which now attain to 
any considerable size only within the tropics. I refer to 
the Equisetaceae, or horsetail family, — slim, cone-crowned 
plants, fringed with green verticillate leaves, or branches 
rather, and which in this country are rarely thicker than a 
quill, or rarely exceed eighteen inches in height, but which 
have been found in the intertropical swanrps of South 
America fifteen feet high, and three inches in circumfer- 
ence at the lower part of the stem. In the Oolite of 
Scotland, a well-marked, long-extinct species, the JEquise- 
tum columnar e must have attained, judging from the 
thickness of the stem, which is sometimes full three inches 
in diameter, to at least thrice the size of its tropical con. 
geners. As shown by its remains, wmich occur in the 
lignite shales of Brora, it must have been a plant of con- 
siderable elegance of form, encircled at each joint in some 
of the specimens by torus-like mouldings grooved cross- 
wise, traversed in the spaces between by longitudinal 
markings, delicately punctulated, and gracefully feathered 
from root to pointed top by its verticillate garlands of 
spiky leaves. The Lycopodiaceag or club-moss family, 
existing in rather massier and more aboraceous forms than 
now, though reduced in a greatly more than equal degree 
from their gigantic congeners of the Coal Measures, were 
also abundant (as shown by the rocks of Helmsdale) in 
the Oolitic flora of Scotland : and with these there min r 



192 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

gled various genera, consisting of numerous species of 
well-marked ferns. Ferns, indeed, so far as we yet know, 
may be regarded as forming the base, and pines the apex, 
of the terrestrial Oolitic flora; and between these two 
extremes most of its other productions seem to have 
ranged. The Cycadacese possess certain characters which 
belong to both : they are, if I may so speak, fern-pines, 
with, in some instances, a peculiarity of aspect which 
seems also to ally them to the palms. Again, the Lyco- 
podiacese, intermediate between the mosses and the ferns, 
may be described as fern-mosses, with a peculiarity of 
aspect in some of the Oolitic species that seems to ally 
them to the pines. And the Equisetacese belongs to at 
least the same sub-class as the ferns, — the Acrogens. 
The Palmse, as shown by the English deposits, were also 
present in the Oolitic flora: nor is it probable that a 
species of vegetation which the old Yorkshire of the 
Oolite possessed, the old Scotland of the Oolite should 
have wanted ; though I have not yet succeeded in finding 
the remains of palms in any of our Scotch deposits. 

The animal productions of our country during this early 
period were divided, like those of the present time, into 
the four great Cuvierian divisions, all of which we still 
find in a fossil state in our rocks. Corals akin to the trop- 
ical forms, — some of them of great size, — with star-fishes 
and sea-eggs, represent the radiata; a fossil lobster which 
occurs in the Lias of Cromarty somewhat meagrely repre- 
sents the articulata. The shelled mollusca we find very 
largely represented in almost all their classes and families, 
from the high Cephalopods to the low Brachipods ; and in 
this division the peculiar character of the Oolitic system is 
more strongly impressed than even on its flora. Its corals, 
though many of them of great size, as I have just said, 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 193 

and of elegant form, might almost pass for those of the 
intertropical seas of the present day; nor are its Crustacea 
and insects, even where best preserved, as in the Oolites 
of England, of a character widely different from those 
which still exist. But by much the larger part of its 
mollusca bear the stamp of a fashion that has perished. 
It is chiefly, however, in its molluscs of the first class, — 
the Cephalopoda, — creatures of a high standing in their 
division, and represented in the present day by the nauti- 
lus and the cuttle-fish, that we recognize in its fullest extent 
this extinct peculiarity of type and form. Its Brachipods, 
chiefly terebratulse, not unfrequent in the Sutherland Ooli- 
tes, and in the Lias of Cromarty and Skye, — its periwin- 
kles, whelks, aviculag, pinnae, pectens, oysters, and mussels, 
few of them wanting in any of our Scotch Liassic or Ooli- 
tic deposits, and many of them very abundant, though all 
specifically extinct, present us, though with a large admix- 
ture of strange and exotic forms, with many other forms 
with which, generically, at least, we are familiar. But 
among the Cephalopods all is strange and unwonted ; and 
their vast numbers — greater at this period of the world's 
history than in any former or any after time — have the 
effect of imparting their own unfamiliar character to the 
whole molluscan group of the Oolite. I need but refer to 
two families of these, — the Belemnite family and the fam- 
ily of the Ammonites ; both of them so remarkable, that 
they attracted in their rocks the notice of the untaught 
inhabitants of both England and Scotland, and excited 
their imagination to the point at which myths and fables 
are produced, long ere Geology existed as a name or was 
known as a science. The Belemnites are the old thunder- 
bolts of the north of Scotland, that, in virtue of their sup- 
posed descent from heaven, were deemed all potent in 

17 



194 LECTUKES ON GEOLOGY. 

certain cases of bewitchment and the Ammonites are 
those charmed snakes of the mediaeval legend, 

" That each one 
Was changed into a coil of stone, 
When holy Hilda prayed." 

The exact affinities of the Belemnite family have formed a 
subject of controversy of late years among our highest 
authorities, — men such as Professor Owen taking up one 
side, and men such as Dr. Mantell the other. But there 
can be little doubt that it more nearly approached to our 
existing cuttle-fishes than to any other living animals; 
while there is no question that its contemporary the Am- 
monite is now most nearly represented, though of course 
only approximately, by the nautilus. The Belemnite ex- 
isted in some of its species throughout all the formations 
of the great Secondary division, but neither during those 
of the Palaeozoic nor yet of the Tertiary divisions ; the 
Ammonite, on the other hand, though in an extreme and 
aberrant form, preceded it by several formations, but be- 
came extinct at the same time, — neither Ammonite nor 
Belemnite outliving the deposition of the Chalk. 

The first great division of the animal kingdom, the 
vertebrata, was represented in Scotland during the Oolitic 
period by fishes and reptiles. Its fishes seem to have been 
restricted to two orders, — that placoid order to which the 
existing sharks belong, and that ganoid order, now well- 
nigh worn out in creation, to which the Xepidosteus of 
the North American lakes and rivers belongs, and to which 
I incidentally referred in connection with the Lepidotus 
of the Weald. I have found in the island of Eigg beds 
of a limestone composed almost entirely of fossil shells, 
which were strewed over with the teeth of an extinct 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 195 

genus of sharks, the Hybodonts; and I have seen the 
dorsal spines of the same placoid division occasionally 
occurring among the Oolites of Sutherland and the Lias 
of Eathie. And scales, cerebral plates, and in some in- 
stances considerable portions of individuals of the ganoidal 
species, glittering in the enamel to which they owe their 
name, occur in all the Oolitic deposits of Scotland. Of 
our Scottish reptiles of the Oolite we have still a good 
deal to learn. I was fortunate enough in 1844 to find in 
a deposit of Eigg, and again at Helmsdale in 1849, the 
remains of several of its more characteristic Enaliosaurs, 
or bepaddled reptiles of the sea; at Helmsdale I found 
vertebral joints of the Ichthyosaurus in a conglomerate 
lower in the Oolite ; and in Eigg, in a stratum composed 
of littoral univalves, vertebral joints, phalanges, and por- 
tions of the humerus and of the pelvic arch of Plesiosau- 
rus, together with the limb-bones of crocodileans, and 
fragments of the carapace of a tortoise. Previous, how- 
ever, to even the earlier date of my discoveries, the tooth 
of a Saurian had been found in the Sutherlandshire Oolite 
by Mr. (now Sir Roderick) Murchison, and the limb-bone 
of a Chelonian with a sauroid vertebra, in the outlier of 
the Morayshire Weald at Linksfield. My collection, how- 
ever, though still very inadequate in this department, con- 
tains, in quantity at least, and, I am disposed to think, in 
variety also, some eight or ten times more of the reptilian 
remains of Scotland, during the Secondary ages, than all 
the other collections of the kingdom. They at least serve 
to demonstrate that the Oolitic period in what is now our 
country was, as in England and on the Continent, a period 
of huge and monstrous reptiles, — that the bepaddled 
Enaliosaurs, the strange reptilian predecessors of the Ce- 
tacea, haunted our seas in at least two of their generic 



193 LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 

forms, — that of the Ichthyosaur and that of the Ple- 
siosaur ; that our rivers were frequented by formidable 
crocodiles ; and that tortoises of various perished species 
lived in our lakes and marshes, or, according to their na- 
tures, disported on the drier grounds. Nor is it ]3robable 
that the other reptilian monsters of the time, the con- 
temporaries of these creatures in England, would have 
been wanting here. We may safely infer that flocks of 
Pteroclactyles — reptiles mounted on bat-like wings, and 
as wild and monstrous in aspect and proportion as roman- 
cer of the olden time ever feigned — fluttered through 
the tall pine-forests, or perched on the cycadese and the 
tree-ferns ; that the colossal Iguanodon and gigantic Hy- 
laBOsaurus browsed on the succulent equisetacese of the 
low meadows; that the minute Amphitherium, an insec- 
tivorous mammal of the period, lodged among the ferns 
on the drier grounds, where extinct grasshoppers chirped 
throughout the long bright summer, and antique coleoptera 
burrowed in the sand ; and that far off at sea there were 
moments when the sun gleamed bright on the polished 
sides of the enormous Cetiosaurus, as it rose from the bot- 
tom to breathe. But I must close this part of my subject, 
— the Scottish flora and fauna of the Oolite, — on which 
my narrow limits permit me, as you see, to touch at merely 
a few salient points, — with two brief remarks. First, 
So rich was its flora, that its remains formed on the east 
coast of Sutherland a coal, or rather lignite field, so con- 
siderable that it was wrought for greatly more than a cen- 
tury, — at one time to such effect, that during the twelve 
years which intervened between 1814 and 1826, no fewer 
than seventy thousand tons of coal were extracted from 
one pit. Second, The strange union which we find in the 
same beds of trees that seem to have languished under 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 197 

chill and severe skies, with plants, corals, and shells of a 
tropical or semi-tropical character, need not be regarded 
as charged with aught like conflicting evidence respecting 
the climatal conditions of the time. Climate has its zones 
marked out as definitely by thousands of feet on our hill- 
sides as by degrees of latitude on the surface of the globe ; 
and if the Scotland of the Oolitic period was, as is prob- 
able, a mountainous country traversed by rivers, produc- 
tions of an intertropical, and of even a semi-arctic char- 
acter, may have been not only produced within less than 
a day's journey of each other, but their remains may have 
been mingled by land-floods, as we find the huge corals of 
Helmsdale blent with its slow-growing pines, among the 
debris of some littoral bed. The poet's exquisite descrip- 
tion of Lebanon suggests, I am disposed to think, the true 
reading of the enigma : 

" Like a glory the broad sun 
Hangs over sainted Lebanon, 
Whose head in wintry grandeur towers, 

And whitens with eternal sleet ; 
While summer, in a vale of flowers, 

Is sleeping rosy at his feet." 

The mere lists of the botanist and zoologist are in them- 
selves repulsive and un-ideaed; and yet the existences 
which their arbitrary signs represent are the vital marvels 
of creation, — the noble forests, fair shrubs, and delicate 
flowers, and the many-featured denizens of the animal 
world, so various in their forms, motions, and colors, and 
so wondrous in their structure and their instincts. I have 
been presenting you this evening with little else than a 
dry list of the Scottish productions of the Wealden and 
Oolitic ages, — a list necessarily imperfect, and all the more 
unsuggestive from the circumstance that, as myriads of 

17* 



198 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

ages had elapsed between the extinction of the races and 
families which its signs represent, and their first applica- 
tion as signs, so these signs, in their character as vocables, 
belong to languages as dead as the organisms themselves. 
The organisms were dead and buried, and converted into 
lignite or stone, long ages ere there was language enough 
in the world to furnish them with names ; and now the 
dead has been employed to designate the dead, — dead 
languages to designate the remains of dead creations. 
Could we but see the productions of our country as they 
once really existed, — could we travel backwards into the 
vanished past, as we can descend into the strata that con- 
tain their remains, and walk out into the woods, or along 
the sea-shores of old Oolitic Scotland, — we should be 
greeted by a succession of marvels strange beyond even 
the conceptions of the poet, or at least only equalled by 
the creations of him, who, in his adventurous song, sent 
forth the Lady Una to wander over a fairy land of dreary 
wolds and trackless forests, whose caverns were haunts of 
dragons and satyrs, and its hills the abodes 

" Of dreadful beasts, that, when they drew to hande, 
Half-flying and half-floating, in their haste, 

Did with their largeness measure o'er much lande, 
And made wide shadow under bulksome waist, 

As mountain doth the valley overcaste; 
And trailing scaly tails did rear afore 

Bodies all monstrous, horibill, and vaste." 

Let us, however, ere we part for the evening, adventure a 
short walk into the wilds of the Oolitic, in that portion of 
space now occupied on the surface of the globe by the 
north-eastern hills of Sutherland, where they abut on the 
precipitous Ord. 

We stand on an elevated wood-covered ridge, that on 



LECTURES Otf GEOLOGY. 199 

the one hand overlooks the blue sea, and descends on the 
other towards a broad river, beyond which there spreads a 
wide expanse of a mountainous, forest-covered country. 
The higher and more distant hills are dark with pines; 
and, save that the sun, already low in the sky, is flinging 
athwart them his yellow light and gilding, high over 
shaded dells and the deeper valleys, cliff, and copse, and 
bare mossy summit, the general coloring of the background 
would be blue and cold. But the ray falls bright and 
warm on the rich vegetation around us, — tree-ferns, and 
tall club-mosses, and graceful palms, and the strangely 
proportioned cycadacese, whose leaves seem fronds of the 
bracken fixed upon decapitated stumps; and along the 
banks of the river we see tall, intensely green hedges of 
the feathered equisetacese. Brown cones and withered 
spiky leaves strew the ground; and scarce a hundred 
yards away there is a noble Araucarian, that raises, sphere- 
like, its proud head more than a hundred feet over its 
fellows, and whose trunk, bedewed with odoriferous bal- 
sam, glistens to the sun. The calm stillness of the air 
makes itself faintly audible in the drowsy hum of insects ; 
there is a gorgeous light-poised dragon-fly darting hither 
and thither through the minuter gnat-like groupes; it 
settles for a moment on one of the lesser ferns, and a small 
insectivorous creature, scar.ce larger than a rat, issues 
noiselessly from its hole, and creeps stealthily towards it. 
But there is the whirr of wings heard overhead, and, lo! a 
monster descends, and the little mammal starts back into 
its hole. 'Tis a winged dragon of the Oolite, a carnivor- 
ous reptile, keen of eye and sharp of tooth, and that to the 
head and jaws of the crocodile adds the neck of a bird, the 
tail of an ordinary mammal, and that floats through the air 
on leathern wings resembling those of the great vampire 



200 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

bat. We have seen, in the minute, rat-like creature, one 
of the two known mammals of this vast land of the Oolite, 
— the insect-eating Amphiiherium / and in the flying 
reptile, one of its strangely organized Pterodactyls. 

But hark! what sounds are these? Tramp, tramp, tramp, 
■ — crash, crash. Tree-fern and club-moss, cycas and zamia, 
yield to the force and momentum of some immense reptile, 
and the colossal Iguanodon breaks through. He is tall as 
the tallest elephant, but from tail to snout greatly more 
than twice as long; bears, like the rhinoceros, a short 
horn on his snout; and has his jaws thickly implanted 
with saw-like teeth. But, though formidable from his 
great weight and strength, he possesses the comparative 
inoffensiveness of the herbivorous animals ; and, with no 
desire to attack, and no necessity to defend, he moves 
slowly onward, deliberately munching, as he passes, the 
succulent stems of the cycadacea. The sun is fast sinking, 
and, as the light thickens, the reaches of the neighboring 
river display their frequent dimples, and ever and anon 
long scaly backs are raised over its surface. Its numerous 
crocodileans are astir ; and now they quit the stream, and 
w r e see its thick hedge-like lines of equisetaceae open and 
again close, as they rustle through, to scour, in quest of 
prey, the dank meadows that line its banks. There are 
tortoises that will this evening find their protecting armor 
of carapace and plastron all too weak, and close their long 
lives of centuries. And now we saunter downwards to the 
shore, and see the ground-swell breaking white in the 
calm against ridges of coral scarce less white. The shores 
are strewed with shells of pearl, — the whorled Ammonite 
and the Nautilus ; and amid the gleam of ganoidal scales, 
reflected from the green depths beyond, we may see the 
phosphoric trail of the Belemnite, and its path is over 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 201 

shells of strange form and name, — the sedentary Gryphaea, 
the Pern a, and the Plagiostoma. 

But lo! yet another monster. A snake-like form, sur- 
mounted by a crocodilean head, rises high out of the water 
within yonder coral ledge, and the fiery, sinister eyes peer 
inquiringly round, as if in quest of prey. The body is but 
dimly seen ; but it is short and bulky compared with the 
swan-like neck, and mounted on paddles instead of limbs ; 
so that the entire creature, wholly unlike anything which 
now exists, has been likened to a boa constrictor threaded 
through the body of a turtle. We have looked upon the 
Plesiosaurus. And now outside the ledge there is a huge 
crocodilean head raised ; and a monstrous eye, huger than 
that of any other living creature, — for it measures a full 
foot across, — glares upon the slimmer and less powerful 
reptile, and in an instant the long neck and small head dis- 
appear. That monster of the immense eye, — an eye so 
constructed that its focus can be altered at will, and made 
to comprise either near or distant objects, and the organ 
itself adapted either to examine microscopically or to ex- 
plore as a telescope, — is another be-paddled reptile of the 
the sea, the Ichthyosaurus^ or fish-lizard. But the night 
comes on, and the shadows of the woods and rocks deepen: 
there are uncouth sounds along the beach and in the forest ; 
and new monsters of yet stranger shape are dimly dis- 
covered moving amid the uncertain gloom. Reptiles, rep- 
tiles, reptiles, — flying, swimming, waddling, walking ; — 
the age is that of the cold-blooded, ungenial reptile ; and, 
save in the dwarf and inferior forms of the marsupials and 
insectivora, not one of the honest mammals has yet ap- 
peared. And now the moon rises in clouded majesty y and 
now her red wake brightens in one long strip of the dark 
sea ; and we may mark where the Cetiosaurus, a sort of 



202 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

reptilian whale, comes into view as it crosses the lighted 
tract, and is straightway lost in the gloom. But the night 
grows dangerous, and these monster-haunted woods were 
not planted for man. Let us return then to the safer and 
better furnished world of the present time, and to our 
secure and quiet homes. 



LECTURE FIFTH. 

The Lias of the Hill of Eathie — The Beauty of its Shores— Its Deposits, how 
formed — Their Animal Organisms indicative of successive Platforms of Exist- 
ences — The Laws of Generation and of Death — The Triassic System — Its 
Economic and Geographic Importance — Animal Footprints, hut no Fossil 
Organisms found in it — The Science of Ichnology originated in this fact — Illus- 
trated by the appearance of the Compensation Pond, near Edinburgh, in 1842 — 
The Phenomenon indicated by the Footprints in the Triassic System — The Trias- 
sic and Permian Systems once regarded as one, under the name of the New Red 
Sandstone — The Coal Measures in Scotland next in Order of Succession to the 
Triassic System — Differences in the Organisms of the two Systems — Extent 
of the Coal Measures of Scotland — Their Scenic Peculiarities — Ancient Flora 
of the Carboniferous Period — Its Fauna — Its Reptiles and Reptile Fishes 
— The other Organisms of the Period — Great Depth of the System — The Pro- 
cesses by which during countless Ages it had been formed. 

The Lias forms, as I have already had occasion to re- 
mark, the base of the great Oolitic system. I dealt in my 
last address with the productions, vegetable and animal, of 
those long ages of the world's history which the various 
deposits of this system represent, and attempted a restora- 
tion of some of its more striking scenes, as they must have 
existed of old, in what is now Scotland. But in glancing 
once more at the Lias, we must pass from the living to the 
dead, — from the vital myriads that once were, to the 
cemetery that contains their remains. I shall select as my 
example a single Liassic deposit of Scotland, but in several 
respects one of the most remarkable, — that of Eathie, on 
the shores of the Moray Frith, about four miles from the 
town of Cromarty. And in visiting it in its character as a 
great burial-ground, — the final resting-place, not only of 



201 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

perished individuals, but also of extinct tribes arid races, 
and in scanning its strangely sculptured monuments, rough- 
ened with hieroglyphics, to which living nature furnishes 
the key, we may perhaps be permitted to indulge in some 
of those reflections which so naturally suggest themselves 
in solitary churchyards, or among the tombs of the ancient 
dead. 

The hill of Eathie is a picturesque eminence of granitic 
gneiss, largely mixed with beds of hornblende schist, which 
extends, in a long precipitous ridge, some five or six hun- 
dred feet in height, along the northern side of the Moray 
Frith, and forms one of a primary chain of hills, which, in 
their upheaval, nptilted deposits of the Lias and Oolite. 
The deposit which the hill Eathie disturbed is exclusively 
a Liassic one : the upturned edge of the base of the forma- 
tion rests against the bottom of the hill ; and we may trace 
the edges of its various upper deposits for several hundred 
feet outwards, bed above bed, until, apparently near the 
top of the formation, we lose them in the sea. There is a 
wild beauty on the shores of Eathie. A selvage of com- 
paratively level ground, that occupies the space between 
the rocky beach and an inflection of the hill, seems em- 
bosomed in solitude ; the naked scaurs and furze-covered 
slopes, where the fox and the badger breed, interpose their 
dizzy fence between it and the inhabited portions of the 
country above; while the rough unfrequented shore and 
wide-spreading sea form the secluding barriers below. The 
only human dwellings visible are the minute specks of 
white that look out in the sunshine from the dim and 
diluted blue of the opposite coast; and we may see the 
lonely frith broadening and widening as it recedes from 
the eye, and opens to the ocean in a direction so uninter- 
rupted by land, that the waves, which, when the wind 



LECTURES Otf GEOLOGY. 205 

blows from the keen north, first begin to break on the dis- 
tant headlands, and then come running up the coast, like 
white coursers, may have heaved their first undulating 
movements under the polar ice. The scene seems such a 
one as the anchorite might choose to wear out life in, far 
from the society of fellow-man ; and we actually find, in 
exploring its bosky thickets of wild rose and sloe-thorn, 
that some anchorite of the olden time did make choice of 
it. A gray shapeless hillock of lichened stone, shaded by 
luxuriant tufts of fern, still bears the name of the old 
chapel; and an adjacent spring, on whose overhanging 
sprays of ivy we may occasionally detect minute tags of 
linen and woollen cloth, — the offerings of a long-derived 
superstition, not quite extinct in the district, — is still 
known as the Saint's Well. But who the anchorite was, 
tradition has long since forgot ; and it was only last year 
that I succeeded in recovering the name of the saint from 
an old man, whose father had been a farmer on the land 
considerably more than a hundred years before. The 
chapel and spring had been dedicated, he said, to St. Ken- 
nat, — a name which we need scarce look for in the 
Romish Calendar, but which designated, it is probable, 
one of our old Culdee saints. 

The various beds of the Eathie deposit, — all, save the 
lowest, which consists of a blue adhesive clay, — are com- 
posed of a dark, finely laminated shale ; and, varying in 
thickness from thirty feet to thirty yards, they are curi- 
ously separated from each other by bands of fossiliferous 
limestone. And so impalpable a substance are these 
shales, that, when subjected to calcination, which is neces- 
sary to extract the bitumen with which they are charged, 
and which gives them toughness and coherency, they re- 
solve into a powder, used occasionally, from its extreme 

18 



206 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

fineness, in the cleaning of polished brass and copper. 
They were laid down, it is probable, in circumstances similar 
to those in which, as described by the late Captain Basil 
Hall, extensive deposits are now taking place in the Yellow 
Sea of China. "At sunset," says Captain Hall, in the 
narrative of his voyage to Loo-Choo, " no land could be 
perceived from the mast-head, although we were in less 
than five fathoms water. And before the day broke next 
morning, the tide had fallen a whole fathom, which brought 
the ship's bottom within three feet of the ground. It was 
soon afterwards discovered that she was actually sailing 
along with her keel in the mud, which was sufficiently in- 
dicated by a long yellow train in our wake. Some incon- 
venience was caused by this extreme shallowness, as it re- 
tarded our headway, and affected the steering ; but there 
was in reality not much danger, as it was ascertained, by 
forcing long poles into the ground, that for many fathoms 
below the surface on which the sounding lead rested, and 
from which level the depth of water is estimated, the bot- 
tom consisted of nothing but mud formed of an impalp- 
able powder, without the least particle of sand or gravel.'* 
The Liassic deposit of Eathie must have been of slow de- 
position. It consists of laminae as thin as sheets of paste- 
board, which, of course, shows that there was but little 
deposited at a time, and pauses between each deposit. 
And, though a soft muddy surface could have been of it- 
self no proper habitat for the sedentary animals, — serpulaa, 
oysters, gryphites, and terebratulae, — we can find farther, 
that they did, notwithstanding, find footing upon it, by at- 
taching themselves to the dead shells of such of the sailing 
or swimming molluscs, Ammonites and Belemnites, as died 
over it, and left upon it their remains ; from which we in- 
fer that the pauses must have been very protracted, seeing 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 207 

that they gave time sufficient for the Terebratulae, — shells 
that never moved from the place in which they were origi- 
nally fixed, — -to grow up to maturity. The thin leaves of 
these Liassic volumes must have been slowly formed and 
deliberately written ; for as a series of volumes, reclining 
against a granite pedestal in the geologic library of nature, 
I used to find pleasure in regarding them. The limestone 
bands, curiously marbled with lignite, ichthyolite, and 
shell, formed the stiff boarding ; and the thin pasteboard- 
like laminae between, — tens and hundreds of thousands in 
number in even the slimmer volumes, — composed the 
closely written leaves. For never did characters or figures 
lie closer in a page than the organisms on the surfaces of 
these leaf-like laminae. Permit me to present you from my 
note-book with a few readings taken during a single visit 
from these strange pages. 

We insinuate our lever into a fissure of the shale, and 
turn up a portion of one of the laminae, whose surface had 
last seen the light when existing as part of the bottom of 
the old Liassic sea, when more than half the formation had 
still to be deposited. Is it not one of the prints of Sower- 
by's "Mineral Conch ology" that has opened up to us? 
Kay, the shells lie too thickly for that, and there are too 
many repetitions of organisms of the same species. The 
drawing, too, is finer, and the shading seems produced 
rather by such a degree of relief in the figures as may be 
seen in those of an embossed card, than by any arrangement 
of lighter and darker color. And yet the general tone of 
the coloring, though dimmed by the action of untold cen- 
turies, is still very striking. The ground of the tablet is 
of a deep black, while the colors stand out in various 
shades, from opaque to a silvery white, and from silvery 
white to deep gray. There, for instance, is a group of 



208 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

large Ammonites, as if drawn in white chalk; there, a clus- 
ter of minute bivalves resembling Pectens, each of which 
bears its thin film of silvery nacre; there, a gracefully 
formed Lima in deep neutral tint; while, lying athwart 
the page, like the dark hawthorn leaf in Bewick's well- 
known vignette, there are two slim sword-shaped leaves 
colored in deep umber. We lay open a portion of another 
page. The centre is occupied by a large Myacites, still 
bearing a warm tint of yellowish brown, and which must 
have been an exceedingly brilliant shell in its day ; there 
is a Modiola, a smaller shell, but similar in tint, though not 
quite so bright, lying a few inches away, with an assem- 
blage of dark gray Gryphites of considerable size on the 
one side, and on the other a fleet of minute Terebratulae, 
that had been borne down and covered up by some 
fresh deposit from above, when riding at their anchors. 
We turn over yet another page. It is occupied exclu- 
sively by Ammonites of various sizes, but all of one 
species, as if a whole argosy, old and young, convoyes and 
convoyed, had been wrecked at once, and sent disabled 
and dead to the bottom. And here we open yet another 
page more. It bears a set of extremely slender Belem- 
nites. They lie along and athwart, and in every possible 
angle, like a heap of boarding-pikes thrown carelessly 
down a vessel's deck on the surrender of the crew. Here, 
too, is an assemblage of bright black plates, that shine like 
pieces of japan work, the cerebral plates of some fish 
of the ganoid order ; and here an immense accumulation 
of minute glittering scales of a circular form. We apply 
the microscope, and find every little interstice in the page 
covered with organisms. And leaf after leaf, for tens and 
hundreds of feet together, repeats the same strange story.'* 
The great Alexandrian library, with its unsummed tomes 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 209 

of ancient literature, the accumulation of long ages, was 
but a poor and meagre collection, scarce less puny in bulk 
than recent in date, when compared with this vast and 
wondrous library of the Scotch Lias. 

Now, this Eathie deposit is a crowded burying-ground, 
greatly more charged with remains of the dead, and more 
thoroughly saturated with what was once animal matter, 
than ever yet was city burying-ground in its most unsani- 
tary state. Every limestone band or nodule, yields, when 
struck by the hammer, the heavy fetid odor of corruption 
and decay ; and so charged is the laminated shale with an 
animal-derived bitumen, that it flames in the fire as if 
it had been steeped in oil, and yields a carburetted hydro- 
gen gas scarce less abundantly than some of our coals 
of vegetable origin. The fact of the existence, through- 
out all the geological ages, of the great law of death, is 
a fact which must often press upon the geologist. Almost 
all the materials of his history he derives from cenotaphs 
and catacombs. He finds no inconsiderable portion of 
the earth's crust composed of the remains of its ancient 
inhabitants, — not of dead individuals merely, but also 
of dead species, dead genera, nay, of even dead creations ; 
and here, where the individual dead lie as thickly on the 
surface of each of many thousand layers as leaves along 
the forest glades in autumn, — here, where all the species 
and many of the genera are dead, nay, where the whole 
creation represented by its multitudinous organisms is 
dead, — the great problem which this law of death pre- 
sents comes upon the explorer in its most palpable and 
urgent form. The noble verses of James Montgomery, 
somewhat exagerative in their character when addressed 
to a molehill, become as remarkable for their sober pro- 
priety as for their beauty when employed here : 

18* 



210 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

" Tell me, thou dust beneath my feet, 
Thou dust that onee hadst breath, — 
Tell me how many mortals meet 
In this small hill of death? 

By wafting winds and flooding rains, 

From ocean, earth and sky, 
Collected, here the frail remains 

Of slumbering millions lie. 

The mole that scoops, with curious toil, 

Her subterranean bed, 
Thinks not she ploughs so rich a soil, 

And mines among the dead. 

But ! where'er she turns the ground, 

My kindred earth I see; 
Once every atom of this mound 

Lived, breathed, and felt like me. 

Like me, these elder-born of clay 

Enjoyed the cheerful light, 
Bore the brief burden of a day, 

And went to rest at night. 

Methinks this dust yet heaves with breath, 

Ten thousand pulses beat : 
Tell me, in this small hill of death 

How man} r mortals meet." 

What does this inexorable law of death mean, or on 
what principle does it depend ? In our own species it has 
a moral significancy, — "Death reigned from Adam," and 
though a pardonable mistake, no longer insisted on by 
at least theologians of the higher class, the same moral 
character, as a reflex influence, has been made to attach to 
it in its inevitable connection with the inferior animals. 
But in them, it seems to have no moral significancy. 

Bacon makes a shrewd distinction, in one of his Essays, 
between " death as the wages of sin," and death as " a 
tribute due to nature;" and we can now fully appreciate 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 211 

the value of the distinction. For we now know that 
while, as the wages of sin, it has reigned from but the 
fall of Adam, it has reigned as a tribute due to nature 
throughout the long lapse of the geologic ages from the 
first beginnings of life upon our planet. "What, then, does 
this inexorable law of death mean ? and on what principle 
does it depend ? 

It was in mere cobweb toils that those Sadducees who 
believed " not in angel, neither in spirit," endeavored to 
entangle our Saviour, when they propounded to him the 
case of the woman with the seven husbands, and de- 
manded whose wife of the seven she was to be in the 
Resurrection. But there was a profundity in the reply, 
which the theologians of nearly two thousand years have, 
I am disposed to think, failed adequately to comprehend. 
" The children of this world marry and are given in mar- 
riage," he said, "but the children of the Resurrection 
neither marry nor are given in marriage, neither can they 
die any more." Now there seems to be a strictly logical 
sequence between the two distinct portions of this pro- 
position, — the enunciation that the denizens of the state 
after death do not marry, and the enunciation that they 
do not die, which for eighteen centuries there was not 
science enough in the world adequately to appreciate. 
The marriage provision was simply a provision tanta- 
mount to the original injunction, not of paradise merely, 
but of every preceding period in which there were organi- 
zations of matter possessed by the vital principle : " In- 
crease and multiply, and replenish the earth." And all 
geology presses upon us the conviction, so powerfully 
enforced by the Liassic deposit at Eathie, that, from the 
very nature of things, the law of generation and the law 
of death, wherever space is limited, cannot be dissociated. 



212 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

Each of the multitudinous leaves of the Lias formed in 
succession an upper surface, or platform, on which, for a 
certain period of time in the world's history, living and 
sentient creatures pursued the several instincts of their 
natures, and then ceased to exist. And so immense, in 
many instances, was the crowd, that, had the existence 
of two platforms been restricted to the occupancy of only 
one platform, they would have lacked footing. A dense 
crowd of living men may find ample standing-room in an 
ancient city churchyard, occupying, as they do, a different 
stratum of space from that occupied by the dead ; but 
were the dead to revive and arise, it would be impossible 
that the living could find in it the necessary standing- 
room any longer. They would be jostled from their 
places far beyond the limits of the inclosing wall. And 
let us remember, that " the great globe itself which we 
inherit " is all one vast burying-ground ; nor is it to one 
stratum that the densely piled remains of its dead are 
restricted, nor to one hundred, nor to one thousand, nor 
yet to one hundred thousand strata. Even in this deposit 
of the Eathie Lias, the successive platforms of the dead 
may be reckoned up by thousands and tens of thousands; 
and it would be more possible that a fertile field should 
have growing upon it at once the harvests of ten thousand 
succeeding autumns, than that any one of the platforms 
should have living upon it at once the existences of all the 
innumerable platforms above and below. The great law 
" increase and multiphj " gave to each platform its count- 
less crowds ; and to make room for the continuous opera- 
tion of this law, the other great law of death came into 
action, and so the generations of succeeding periods found 
space to pursue their various instincts on platforms com- 
posed in no small part of the perished generations from 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 213 

which they had sprung. Throughout the whole incalcula- 
ble past of our planet, — throughout all its unmeasured and 
unmeasurable periods, — the laws of production and decay- 
have gone inseparably together ; they were twin stars on 
the horizon, tinged by the complementary colors, and so 
inseparably associated, that the appearance of the one 
always heralded the rise of the other. And to my mind 
at least, it does seem demonstrative of the full-orbed and 
perfect wisdom of the Divine Master of the Theolo- 
gians, that He, with that quiet simplicity which Pascal so 
well designates the characteristic style of Godhead, and 
with a logic too profound to be appreciated at the time, 
should have coupled together the twin laws of production 
and decay, as equally inadmissible into that future state in 
which the life of man is to be no longer 

" Summed up in birthdays and in sepulchres." 

" The children of the resurrection neither marry nor are 
given in marriage, neither can they die any more." 

From the Oolite, with its Liassic frase, we pass on to 
the Triassic system, — a deposit less characteristically de- 
veloped in England than on the Continent, but of much 
economic importance, from those vast beds of rock-salt 
which, in Britain, at least, are exclusively restricted to 
this system; and of considerable geographic importance, 
from its great lateral extent. In Scotland 1 it occupies 
rather more than a hundred square miles of surface, chiefly 
in Dumfriesshire, along the northern shores of the Solway, 

1 There is good reason to believe that the red rocks overlying the coal 
of Cumberland, the red sandstones of Corncockle Muir, near Dumfries, 
the Ayrshire red sandstones, and those of the Isle of Arran, are all of the 
Permian, not Triassic, epoch. See "Siluria," new edition, p. 351. — 

w. s. s. 



214 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

and in the line of boundary between the two kingdoms, 
where it can boast, among its other celebrities, of the 
famous village of Gretna Green, and the whole of Gretna 
parish. In England it is chiefly remarkable, in a scenic 
point of view, for its extreme flatness : its main feature is 
a want of features. It was, however, at one time, noto- 
rious for its ponds and marshes, consequents of the imper- 
fect drainage incident to flat low surfaces when of great 
extent ; and in Scotland, though so much more limited in 
area, it bears this character still. No fossil organisms have 
yet been found in this deposit in Scotland : it contains, 
however, in abundance, traces of the ancient inhabitants, 
even more curiously imprinted on the stone than if they 
had left in it the remains of their framework ; and is 
interesting as the field in which, from the sedulous study 
of these, and undeterred by the skepticism of some of our 
highest authorities, the late Dr. Duncan, of Ruthwell, laid 
the first foundations of that curious and instructive de- 
partment of geologic science since known as Ichnology. 
The strange reptiles of this ancient time, in passing over 
the tide-uncovered beaches of the district, left their foot- 
steps imprinted in the yielding sand ; and in this sand, no 
longer yielding, but hardened long ages ago into solid 
rock, the footsteps still remain. And with truly wonder- 
ful revelations, — revelations of things the most evanescent 
in themselves, and of incidents regarding which it might 
seem extravagant to expect that any record should remain, 
do we find these strange markings charged. They even 
tell us how the rains of that remote age descended, and 
how its winds blew. 

Let us see whether we cannot indicate a few of at least 
the simpler principles of this department of science. The 
artificial sheet of water situated among the Pentlands, and 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 215 

known as the Compensation Pond, was laid dry, during 
the warm summer of 1842, to the depth of ten fathoms; 
and as a lake bottom ten fathoms from the surface, is not 
often seen, I visited it, in the hope of acquiring a few 
facts that might be of use to me among the rocks. What 
first struck me, in surveying the brown sun-baked bottom 
from the shore, was the manner in which it had cracked, 
in the drying, into irregularly polygonal partings, and that 
the ripple-markings with which it was fretted extended 
along only a narrow border, where the water had been 
shallow enough to permit the winds or superficial currents 
to act on the soft clay beneath. As I descended, I found 
the surface between the partings indented with numerous 
well-marked tracks of the feet of men and animals, made 
while the clay was yet soft, and now fixed in it by the 
drying process, like the mark of the stamp in an ancient 
brick. And some of these tracks were charged with 
little snatches of incident, which they told in a style 
remarkably intelligible and clear. At one place, for in- 
stance, I found the footprints of some four or five sheep. 
They struck out towards the middle of the hollow, but 
turned upwards at a certain point, in an abrupt angle, 
towards the bank they had quitted, and the marks of 
increased speed became palpable. The prints, instead of 
being leisurely set down, so as to make impressions as 
sharp-edged as if they had been carved or modelled in the 
clay, were elongated by being thrown out backwards, and 
the strides were considerably longer than those in the 
downward line. And, bearing direct on the retreating 
footprints from the opposite bank, and also exhibiting 
signs of haste, I detected the track of a dog. The details 
of the incident thus recorded in the hardened mud were 
complete. The sheep had gone down into the hollow 



216 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

shortly after the retreat of the waters, and while it was 
yet soft; and the dog, either acting upon his own judg- 
ment, or on that of the shepherd, had driven them back. 
A little farther on I found the prints of a shoed foot of 
small size. They passed onwards across the hollow, the 
steps getting deeper and deeper as they went, until near 
the middle, where there were a few irregular steps, shorter, 
deeper, and more broken than any of the others ; and 
then the marks of the small shoes altogether disappeared, 
and a small naked foot of corresponding size took their 
place, and formed a long line to the opposite bank. In 
this case, as in the other, the details of the incident were 
clear. Some urchin, in venturing across when the mud 
was yet soft and deep, after wading nearly half the way 
shod, had deemed it more prudent to wade the rest of 
it barefoot than to bemire his stockings. In each case 
the incident was recorded in peculiar characters ; and to 
read such characters aright, when inscribed upon the 
rocks, forms part of the proper work of the ichnologist. 
His key, so far at least as mere incident is concerned, is 
the key of circumstantial evidence ; and very curious 
events, as I have said, — events which one would scarce 
expect to find recorded in the strata of ancient systems, — 
does it at times serve to unlock. 

In some remote and misty age, lost in the deep obscu- 
rity of the unreckoned eternity that hath passed, but 
which we have learned to designate as the Triassic period, 
a strangely formed reptile, unlike anything which now 
exists, paced slowly across the ripple-marked sands of a 
lake or estuary. 1 It more resembled a frog or toad than 

1 Reptiles are known to have existed from the period of the Old Red 
Sandstone, where their tracks have lately been discovered. The reptiles 
of the Coal are of the Batrachian type; the Permian reptiles are allied to 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 217 

any animal with which we are now acquainted; but to 
the batrachian peculiarities it added certain crocodilian 
features, and in size nearly rivalled one of our small High- 
land oxen. The prints it made very much resembled 
those of a human hand ; but, as in the frog, the hinder 
paws were fully thrice the size of the fore ones ; and there 
was a gigantic massiveness in the fingers and thumb, which 
those of the human hand never possess. Onward the crea- 
ture went, slowly and deliberately, on some unknown 
errand, prompted by its instincts; and as the margin of 
the sea or lake, lately deserted by the water, possessed the 
necessary plasticity, it retained every impression sharply. 
The wind was blowing strongly at the time, and the 
heavens were dark with a gathering shower. On came 
the rain ; the drops were heavy and large ; and, beaten 
aslant by the wind, they penetrated the sand, not perpen- 
dicularly, as they would have done had they fallen during 
a calm, but at a considerable angle. But such was the 
weight of the reptile, that, though the rain-drops sank 
deeply into the sand on every side, they made but com- 
paratively faint impressions in its footprints, where the 
compressive effect of its tread rendered the resisting mass 
more firm. "We have here, in a single slab," says Dr. 
Buckland, in referring, in his address to the Geological 
Society for 1840, to these very footprints, and their ad- 
juncts, — "we have here, in a single slab, a combination 
of proofs as to meteoric, hydrostatic, and locomotive phe- 
nomena, which occurred at a time incalculably remote, in 
the atmosphere, the water, and the movements of animals, 
from which we infer, with the certainty of cumulative 
circumstantial evidence, the direction of the wind, the 

Batrachians and Monitors ; while the reptiles of the Trias are Labyrintho- 
dont. — W. S.S. 

19 



218 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

depth and course of the water, and the quarter towards 
which the animals were passing. The latter is indicated 
by the direction of the footsteps which form the track ; 
the size and curvature of the ripple-marks on the sand, 
now converted into sandstone, show the depth and direc- 
tion of the current ; while the oblique impressions of the 
rain-drops register the point from which the wind was 
blowing at or about the time when the animals were 
passing." 1 There is another scarce less curious or less 
minutely recorded incident inscribed on a slab of the 
same formation, figured and described by Sir Roderick 
Murchison. It is impressed by the footprints of some 
betailed batrachian, greatly less bulky than the other, that 
went waddling along much at its leisure, like the sheep in 
the nursery rhyme, "trailing its tail behind it." There 
is a double track of footprints on the slab, — those of 
the right and left feet ; in the middle, between the two, 
lies the long groove formed by the tail, — a groove con- 
tinuous, but slightly zig-zagged, to indicate the waddle. 
The creature, half-way in its course, lay down to rest, hav- 
ing apparently not much to do, and its abdomen formed 
a slight hollow in the sand beneath. Again rising to its 
feet, it sprawled a little, and the hinder part of its body, 
in getting into motion, fretted the portion of the surface 
that furnished what we may term the fulcrum of the move- 
ment, into two wave-like curves. Here, again, are we 
furnished, from the most remote antiquity, with a piece 
of narrative of a kind which assuredly we could scarce 
expect to find enduringly recorded in the rocks. Various 
reptiles have left curious passages of their history of this 

1 The Labyrinthodon BuckJandi (Lloyd), formerly believed to be a Trias- 
sic reptile, is now ranked as belonging to the Permian fauna, See Ham- 
say, Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc., Vol. II. p. 198.— W. S. S. 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 219 

kiixl inscribed on the sandstones of Dumfriesshire; and 
as Sir William Jardine, the proprietor of some of the 
quarries, has set himself to the work of illustration, the 
geologist may soon hope to be put in possession of a mon- 
ograph at once worthy of the subject and of so distin- 
guished a naturalist. 1 The footprints first observed by 
Dr. Duncan were chiefly those of tortoises ; but there also 
exist in the rock numerous tracks of the huge batrachians 
of the period, with traces of a small animal, scarce larger 
than a rat ; and of a nameless, nondescript creature, whose 
footprints might at first glance almost be mistaken for 
those of a horse, but the marks of whose toes have been 
traced, in some of the imjoressions, outside the ring of 
the apparent hoof. 2 And this is all we yet know of these 
reptilian Triassic inhabitants of Scotland. Robinson Cru- 
soe has gone down to the sea-shore, and seen, much to his 
astonishment, the print of a savage foot in the sand. 

According to an old, but not very old, style of nomencla- 
ture, derived from mineralogical character not yet wholly 
obsolete, the two systems, Triassic and Permian, used to 
be included under one general head, as the New Red 
Sandstone, or the Bunter Sandstone of Werner and Jame- 
son. And certainly the mere mineralogist might find it 
no easy matter to draw a line between them. Up to a 
certain point in the ascending scale there occur on the 
Continent strata of a Red Sandstone, known as the Lower 
Bunter; and immediately over it, a Red Sandstone known 
as the Upper Bunter. 1 They lie conformably to each 

1 See Sir William Jardine's work on the "Ichnology of Annandale." 

2 Chelichnus Titan and Gigas Jardine. — W. S. S. 

3 The Bunter sandstein and Bunter schiefer ; of which the Bunter sand- 
stein is now ranked as lowest, Trias, and the Bunter sehiefer as upper, 
Permian. — \(. S. S. 



220 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

other, as if they had been deposited in immediate succes- 
sion in a still sea: there are no traces of physical convul- 
sion; the earthquake and the tornado had slept at the 
time : there was no devastating inundation of molten fire, 
nor overwhelming wave of translation ; — 

" It was not in the battle ; no tempest gave the shock : " 

and yet that undisturbed horizontal line marks where one 
creation ended and another began. It was held, at one 
time that there was not a single organism, vegetable or 
animal, common to the two great divisions to which these 
sandstone beds belong; but there now seems to rest some 
doubt on the point. In an insulated district of France, 
plants of the Coal Measures have been found in a deposit 
containing Belemnites ; and it is held that the Belemnite 
belongs exclusively to the great Secondary division. But 
the specific standing of these Belemnites still remains to 
be determined : it is possible they may not be Secondary 
forms ; and it has been suggested by M. Michelin, a dis- 
tinguished French geologist, that generically the Belem- 
nite may not be of the premised importance in reference 
to the age of these Tarentaise beds. "He is inclined," we 
find him saying, "to consider it an instance of the occur- 
rence of the Belemnite form in the Carboniferous period, 
rather than of the continuance of the same species of 
plants through several successive epochs." 

But, leaving it to the future researches of geologists to 
determine whether there be any, and, if so, how many, 
organisms common to the Secondary and Palaeozoic divis- 
ions, a very slight acquaintance with fossils is sufficient to 
show that between the types of organic nature in these 
two oreat divisions there exist differences and distinctions 
of the broadest and most palpable kind. In passing up- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 221 

wards from the Triassic to the Permian, we seem to pass, 
not merely from one dynasty to another, but, if I may dare 
employ such a term, from one dispensation to another. 
So broad are the differences, that they affect whole classes 
of the animal kingdom. In the class of fishes, for instance, 
an entire change takes place in the form of the tail. There 
are a few ichthyic families in the present day, such as the 
sharks and sturgeons, that have unequally-lobed tails, from 
the circumstance that a prolongation of the vertebral col- 
umn runs into the upper lobe; whereas in perhaps nine- 
teen-twentieths of all the existing families, the vertebral 
column stops short, as in the osseous fishes common at our 
tables, a little over the lobes, to form for them a medial 
basis, and the lobes themselves are equal. And this equal- 
lobed, or, as it is termed, homocercal condition, is the pre- 
vailing one, not only in the present time, but in all the 
Tertiary and in all. the Secondary ages, up till the close of 
the Triassic system. And then, sudden as the shifting of 
a scene, or as one of the abrupt transitions of a dream, we 
find, immediately on entering the great Palaeozoic division, 
an entire change. The unequal-lobed or heterocercal tail 
becomes not only the prevailing, but the only form, save 
in a few exceptional cases, as in that of the Coccosteus of 
the Old Red Sandstone, where there were no lobes at all, 
or as in that of its contemporary the Diplopterus, where 
the lobes strike out laterally from a prolongation of the 
column. In short, the equally-lobed tail ceases with the 
Trias, to reappear no more, and the unequally-lobed tail 
takes its place. Similar changes manifest themselves in 
other divisions and classes of the animal kingdom. "Waiv- 
ing for the present the question raised by the French geol- 
ogist, M. Michelin, in Britain at least the Belemnite, so 
abundant in the Secondary formations, and so characteris- 

19* 



222 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

tic of them, has no place among the formations of the 
Palaeozoic period. Save, too, in a few rare and somewhat 
equivocal species, the equally characteristic Ammonite dis- 
appears. 1 We take leave also of the scarce less character- 
istic Gryphites, of the Trigonia, Plagiostoma, and Perna, 
with several other well-marked types of shell; but we find 
their places amply occupied by types exclusively Palaeo- 
zoic. The Orthoceratites, straight, conical, chambered 
shells, anticipated, we see, the place of the Belemnites; 
the Goniatites, that of the Ammonites proper; the Beller- 
ophon and the Euomphalus, unseen in any other period, 
fall into the general group, and add to the peculiarity of 
its aspect; with a whole array of unwonted forms among 
the brachiopoda, such as Spirifers, Producta, Atrypa, and 
Pentamerus, etc., etc. But it was perhaps in the vegetable 
world that the Palaeozoic ages most remarkably differed 
from those of the subsequent periods, of the geologist, 
whether Secondary, Tertiary, or Recent. We read in the 
older poets, of enchanted forests ; but the true enchanted 
forests, stranger, in their green luxuriance, than poet ever 
yet fancied, and where the botanist, surrounded by irre- 
ducible shapes that would take no place in his systems, 
might well deem himself in a wild dream, were the forests 
of the Coal Measures. 

The Coal Measures of Scotland occupy about two thou- 
sand square miles of surface, and, though much overflown 
by igneous rock, and occasionally broken through by 
patches of Old Red Sandstone, run diagonally across the 
country, from sea to sea, in a tolerably well-defined belt, 
nearly parallel to the line of the southern flank of the 
Grampians. Throughout their entire extent they owe 

1 These views require much modification. See Sir C. Lyell's " Supple- 
ments," 1857. — W. S. S. 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 223 

their scenic peculiarities to the trap ; but where least dis- 
turbed, as in the Dalkeith coal-field, they are of an incon- 
spicuous, low-featured character, and chiefly remarkable 
for their rich fields, as to the east of Edinburgh, between 
the Arthur Seat group of hills and the Garlton hills near 
Haddington ; or for their romantic dells and soft pastoral 
valleys, such as Dryden Dell, or the valley of Lasswade, 
or, to enumerate two other well-known representative 
localities in one stanza, borrowed from Macneil, 

" Koslin's gowany braes sae bonny, 
Crags and water, woods and glen; 
Roslin's banks, unpeei-ed by ony, 
Save the Muse's, Hawthornden." 

The coal-fields owe some of their more characteristic fea- 
tures, especially in the sister kingdom, to man. The tall 
chimneys, ever belching out smoke ; the thickly-sown en- 
gine-houses, with the ever-recurring clank of the engines, 
and the slow-measured motion of their outstretched arms 
seen far against the sky; the involved fretwork of rail- 
ways, connected with some main arterial branch, along 
which the traveller ever and anon marks the frequent 
train sweeping by, laden with coals for the distant city ; 
the long flat lines of low cottages, the homes of the poor 
colliers; and here and there, wdiere the ironstone bands 
occur, a group of smelting furnaces ; — all serve to mark 
the Coal Measures, and to distinguish them from every 
other system. And such — striking off the peculiarities 
of the trap, which has no necessary connection with the 
Carboniferous system, but is common, in some one part of 
the world or another, to all the systems — are some of the 
features, natural and superinduced, of this most important, 
in an economic point of view, of all the geologic forma- 



224 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

tions. They are, as I have said, of no very prominent 
character. The poet Delta describes, in a fine stanza, the 
scenery around and to the east of Edinburgh. But though 
the area which the landscape includes contains one of our 
most considerable coal-basins, — a basin many square miles 
in extent, — it does not furnish him with a single descrip- 
tive reference. Almost all those bolder and more charac- 
teristic features of the scene which his pencil exquisitely 
touches and relieves, it owes to the igneous rocks. 

" Traced in a map the landscape lies, 

In cultured beauty stretching wide; 
There Pentland's green acclivities ; 

There ocean with its azure tide; 
There Arthur Seat, and, gleaming through 

Thy southern wing, Dunedin blue; 
While in the orient, Lammer's daughters, 

A distant giant range are seen ; 
North Berwick Law, with cone of green, 

And Bass amid the waters. " 

The ancient scenery of the Coal Measures would be 
greatly more difficult to trace. As we recede among the 
extinct creations farther and farther from the present time, 
the forms become more strange, and less reducible to 
those compartments to which we assign known classes and 
existing types. Our more solid principles of classification 
desert us, and we are content to substitute instead, remote 
analogies and distant resemblances. We say of one family 
of plants that they somewhat resemble club-mosses, shot 
up in bulk and height into forest trees; and of another 
family, that they would be not very unlike the horsetails 
of our morasses, did horsetails rival in size larches of some 
twenty or thirty years' growth. In referring to yet other 
families, we can avail ourselves — so outre are their forms 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 225 

— of no resemblance at all: we can simply figure and 
describe, and draw our illustrative comparisons, if we em- 
ploy such, rather from the departments of art than of 
nature. It is possible that, were some of our higher bot- 
anists — our Balfours, Browns, and Grevilles — permitted 
to range for a day over the broad plains of Jupiter, or 
amid the bright sunshiny vales of Mercury or Venus, even 
they might be but able to tell us, on their return, of gor- 
geous floras, that defied all their old rules of classification, 
and which could be illustrated from that of our own 
planet only by distant resemblances and remote analogies. 
And assuredly such would be the case, could they, through 
the exercise of some clairvoyant faculty, be enabled to 
journey for millions and millions of years into the remote 
past, and to spend a few enchanted hours amid the dense 
and sombre thickets of a Carboniferous forest. Shall I 
venture on communicating to this audience a snatch of 
personal history, illustrative of the mode in which I myself 
arrived, many years ago, at my earliest formed concep- 
tions regarding the old flora of the Coal Measures ? 

The first perusal of " Gulliver's Travels " forms an era in 
the life of a boy, if the work come in his way at the right 
time ; and I was fortunate enough to secure my first read- 
ing of it at the mature age of eight years. For weeks, 
months, years after, my imagination was filled with the 
little men and little women, and with at least one scene 
laid in the country of the very tall men, — the scene in 
which Gulliver, after wandering amid grass that rose 
twenty feet over his head, lost himself in a vast thicket 
of barley forty feet high. I became the owner, in fancy, 
of a colony of little men; I had little men for inhabiting 
the little houses which I built, for tilling my apron- 
breadth of a garden, and for sailing my little ship ; and, 



226 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

coupling with the men of Lilliput the scene in Brobidgnag, 
I often set myself to imagine, when playing truant all 
alone on the solitary slopes or amid the rocky dells of 
Driemiorie, how the little creatures, who were sure always 
to accompany me on these occasions, would be impressed 
by the surrounding vignette-like scenes and mere pictur- 
esque productions, exaggerated on hill and in hollow, by 
their own minuteness, into great size. I have imagined 
them threading their way through dark and lofty forests 
of bracken fifty feet high, or admiring on the hill-side 
some enormous club-moss, that stretched out its green 
hairy arms over the soil for whole roods, or arrested at the 
edge of some dangerous and dreary morass by hedges 
of gigantic horsetail, that bore atop their many-windowed, 
club-like cones, twenty feet over the dank surface, and 
that shot forth at every joint their green verticillate leaves 
in rings huge as coach-wheels. And while I thus thought, 
or rather dreamed, for my Lilliputian companions, I be- 
came for the time a Lilliputian myself, — saw the minute 
in nature as if through a magnifying glass, — roamed in 
fancy under ferns that had shot up into trees, — and saw 
the dark cones of the equisetaceas stand up over their 
spiky branches some six yards or so above head. But 
these day-visions belonged to an early period : dreams 
of at least a severer, if not more solid cast, dispossessed 
the little men and women of the place they had occupied ; 
and I had learned to think of the wondrous tale of Swift 
as one of the most powerful but least genial of all the 
satires which the errors and perversions of poor humanity 
have ever provoked, when in the year 1824 I formed my 
first practical acquaintance with the flora of the Coal 
Measures. I was engaged as a stone-cutter, a few miles 
from Edinburgh, in making some additions, in the old 



LECTUKES ON GEOLOGY. 227 

English style, to an ancient mansion-house ; and the stone 
in which I wrought, — a curiously variegated sandstone, 
derived from a quarry since shut up, — was, I soon found, 
exceedingly rich in organic casts and impressions. They 
were exclusively vegetable. Often have I detected in the 
rude block placed before me, to be fashioned into some 
moulded transom or carved mullion, fragments of a sculp- 
ture which I might in vain attempt to rival, — the forked 
stems of Lepidodendra, fretted into scales that, save for 
theii' greater delicacy and beauty, might have reminded 
the antiquary of the sculptured corslet of scale-armor 
on the effigies of some ancient knight; the straight- 
stemmed Calamite, fluted from joint to joint, like the 
shaft of some miniature column of the Grecian Doric; 
the Sigillaria, also a fluted column, but of a more mere- 
tricious school than that of Greece, for it was richly 
carved between the flutings ; the Stigmaria, fretted over, 
with its eye-lit holes curiously connected by delicately- 
waved lines ; and occasionally the elaborately ornate 
Ulodendron, with its rows of circular scars, that seemed 
to have been subjected to the lathe of an ornamental 
turner, and its general surface fretted over with what 
seemed to be nicely sculptured leaves, such as we some- 
times see on a Corinthian torus. It was not easy, more 
than a quarter of a century ago, when Sir Roderick Mur- 
chison was still an officer of dragoons, Sir Charles Lyell 
prosecuting the study of English law, and Dr. Buckland 
still engaged with his theory of the Flood, which he had 
given to the world only the previous year, — it was not 
easy, I say, for a working man to have such questions 
solved as these fossils of the Coal Measures served to 
raise. But they were, at length, in some measure solved. 
I was taught to look to those forms of the existing flora 



228 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

of our country that most resembled the forms of its flora 
during the Carboniferous period. And, strange to tell, 
I found I had just to fall back on my old juvenile imag- 
inings, and to form my first approximate conceptions of 
the forests of the Coal Measures by learning to look at 
our ferns, club-mosses, and equisetaceae, with the eye of 
some wandering traveller of Lilliput, lost amid their entan- 
glements, like Gulliver among those of the fields of Brob- 
dignag. When sauntering, after the work of the day was 
over, along the edge of some wood-embosomed streamlet, 
where the horsetail rose thick and rank in the 'danker 
hollows, and the fern shot out its fronds from the drier 
banks, I had to sink in fancy, as of old, into a manikin 
of a few inches, and to see intertropical jungles in the 
tangled grasses and thickly interlaced equisetaceae, and 
tall trees in the herbaceous plants and the shrubs. 

But many a wanting feature had to be supplied, and 
many an existing one altered. Amid forests of arbora- 
ceous ferns, tall as our second-class trees, there stood 
up gigantic club-mosses thicker than the body of a man, 
and from sixty to eighty feet in height ; more than a hun- 
dred and fifty species of smaller ferns, and about one third 
that number of smaller species of club-mosses, clothed the 
opener country ; and along the frequent marshes and lakes 
that covered vast tracts of its flat surface, or the sluggish 
rivers that winded through it, there flourished huge 
thickets of equisetaceae, of from twelve to fourteen different 
species, tall, some of them, as the masts of pinnaces, and 
thick and impenetrable as the fairy hedge that surrounded 
the palace of the sleeping beauty. But among these 
forms of the vegetable world, that, at least through the 
blue steaming vapor of so dank a land, seem but the 
more familiar forms of our lochans and hill-sides many 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 229 

times magnified, there arise strange floral shapes, among 
which we can recognize no existing type. The Uloclen- 
dron, bearing along its carved trunk, on two of its sides, 
rectilinear strips of cones, like rows of buttons on the 
dress of a boy, and the ornately tatooed Sigillaria, lined 
longitudinally, and with its thickly-planted vertical rows 
of leaves bristling from its stem and larger boughs, resem- 
ble no vegetable productions which the earth now yields. 
The landscape, too, has its intertropical forms, — what 
seem gigantic Cacti, with thickets of canes, and a few 
species of palms. And, where here and there a flat hil- 
lock rises a few yards over the general level, we see 
groups of noble Araucarians raising their green tops a 
hundred and fifty feet over the plain. And yet, rich as 
the flora of the period may seem in individuals, and 
though it cumbers the soil with a luxuriance witnessed in 
our own times only among the minuter forms, it is, in all 
save size and bulk, a poor and low flora, after all. The 
Pines and Araucarians form its only forest-trees. We fail 
to meet on its plains a single dicotyledonous plant on 
which a herbivorous mammal could browse. Its Lycopo- 
daceae are covered over with catkin-like cones; there are 
cones on its Ulodendra, cones on its Equisetaceae, cones 
on its Araucarians, cones on its Pines ; but not a single 
fruit have we yet found good for the use of man. Nor, 
after the first impression of novelty has passed away, is 
there much even to gratify the sight. The marvel of 
ornately-carved trunks and well-balanced fronds soon palls 
on the sense ; and the prevalence of those spiky recti- 
linear forms in the scene which Wordsworth could regard 
as such deformities in landscape, and which James Gra- 
hame so deprecates in his " Georgics," " lies like a load on 
the weary eye." Nature labors in the production of huge 

20 



230 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

immaturities ; neither man, the monarch, nor his higher 
subjects, the mammals, have yet appeared; and it is all 
too palpable that that garden has not yet been planted, 
out of the ground of which there shall grow " every tree 
that is pleasant to the sight and good for food." 

Some of the gigantic forms of these primeval forests we 
can only vaguely and imperfectly illustrate by the dwarf 
productions of our present moors and morasses ; and some 
of them we fail to connect, by the links of general resem- 
blance, with aught in the vegetable kingdom that now 
lives. Regarded as a whole, the flora of the Carboniferous 
age seems as remote in its analogues from that which now 
exists, as remote in the period during which it flourished. 
There are, however, at least two families of plants which 
bear, not a loose and general, but a minute and thorough 
resemblance, to families which also existed during the 
great Secondary and Tertiary periods, and which still con- 
tinue to occupy a large space among the recent vegetable 
forms. And these are the Fern and the Pine families. 
All the species have become extinct over and over again; 
but the families, and many of the genera, are ever repro- 
duced ; and, so far as we know, this earth never possessed 
a terrestrial flora that had not its ferns and its pines. In 
all the other divisions and classes of the organic world 
there are also favorite families, such as the Tortoises among 
reptiles, the Cestracions among fishes, the Nautilus among 
Cephalopodes, and the Terebratula among Brachipods. 
There are few geologic formations in which either the 
remains or the footprints of Tortoises have not been de- 
tected ; there seems never to have been an ocean that had 
not its Cestracion ; the Nautilus lived in every age from 
the times of the Lower Silurian deposits down to the pres- 
ent day ; and, after disinterring specimens of fossil terebra- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 231 

tula from our Grauwackes, our Mountain Limestones, our 
Oolites, and our Chalk Flints, we may cast the drag in the 
deeper lochs of the Western Highlands, and bring up the 
living animals, fast anchored by their fleshy cables, to 
stones and shells. We can scarce glance over a group 
of fossils of the two earlier divisions, the Secondary and 
the Palaeozoic, which we do not find divisible into two 
classes of types, — the types which still remain, and the 
types which have disappeared. But why the one set of 
forms should have been so repeatedly called into being, 
while the other set was suffered to become obsolete, we 
cannot so much as surmise. In visiting some old family 
library that has received no accession to its catalogue for 
perhaps more than a century, one is interested in marking 
its more vivacious classes of works — its Shakspeares, 
Robinson Crusoes, and Pilgrim's Progresses — in their 
first, or at least, earlier editions, ranged side by side with 
obsolete, long-forgotten volumes, their contemporaries, 
with whose unfamiliar titles we cannot connect a single 
association. And exactly such is the class of facts with 
which the geologist is called on to deal. He finds an 
immense multiplication of editions in the case of some 
particular type of fish, plant, or shell ; and in the case of 
other types, no after instance of republication, or repub- 
lication in merely a few restricted instances, and during 
a limited term. But while it is always easy to say why, 
in the race of editions, the one class of writings should 
have been arrested at the starting-post, and the other 
class should go down to be contemporary with every after 
production of authorship until the cultivation of letters 
shall have ceased, the geologist finds himself wholly una- 
ble to lay hold of any critical canon through which to 
determine why, in the organic world, one class of types 



232 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

should be so often republished, and another so perempto- 
rily suppressed. This far, however, we may venture to 
infer, from finding the two classes under such a marked 
diversity of dispensation, that creation must have been a 
result, not of the operation of mere law, which would have 
dealt after the same fashion with both, but a consequence 
of the exercise of an elective will ; and that as amid im- 
mense variety of effort and fertility of invention there 
are yet certain features of style, and a certain recurrence 
of words and phrases, that enable us to identify a great 
author, and to recognize a unity in his works that bespeaks 
the unity of the producing mind, so ought these connect- 
ing links and common features of widely-separated, and, 
in the main, dissimilar creations, to teach us the salutary 
lesson that the Author of all is One, and that, in the exer- 
cise of his unrestricted sovereignty and of his infinite wis- 
dom, he chooses and rejects according to his own good 
pleasure. 

From the plants of the swamps and forests of the Coal 
Measures we pass on to its fauna, terrestrial and aquatic ; 
— a fauna which, although less picturesque than its won- 
drous flora, filled with all manner of strange shapes, seems 
to have borne a corresponding character in uniting great 
numeric development to a development comparatively lim- 
ited in classes and orders; and with respect also to the 
extreme antiqueness of many of its types. The prevailing 
forms of both flora and fauna belong equally to a fashion 
that has perished and passed away. 

It was held, up till a very recent period, that there had 
existed no reptiles during the Carboniferous ages. Man 
has been longer and more perseveringly engaged among 
the Coal Measures than in any of the other formations ; 
and, long ere geology existed as a science, what used to 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 233 

be termed its figured stones, — plants, shells and fishes, — 
were, in consequence, well known to collectors, — a class 
of people sent into the world to labor instinctively as pio- 
neers in the physical sciences, without knowing why. I 
have seen prints of some of these figured stones of two 
centuries' standing, and have succeeded in recognizing as 
old acquaintance the Spirifers and Ferns which had sat for 
their pictures to artists who knew nothing of either. Dur- 
ing the last sixty years there have been many collections 
made of the Carboniferous fossils, and many coal-fields 
intelligently examined, but not a trace of the reptile de- 
tected. It was not until Sir Charles LyelPs second visit 
to the United States, five years ago, or rather not until 
the publication of his second series of travels, three years 
after, that it was known to European geologists that the 
coal-fields of Pennsylvania, in the United States, had, like 
the Trias 1 of the south of Scotland and of the sister king- 
dom, their Cheirotherium, of, however, not only, as might 
be anticipated, a different species, but of even a different 
genus, from that of the newer formation, though not less 
decidedly reptilian in its character. And about the same 
time, the remains of a reptile since known as the Arche- 
gosaurus were found in a coal-field in Rhenish Bavaria. 
The Archegosaurus seems to have been a strange-looking 
creature, — half saurian, half batrachian, of comparatively 
small size, with two staring eyes set close together in the 
middle of a flat triangular skull, and furnished with limbs 
terminating in distinct toes, but so slim and weak, "that 
they could have served," says Von Meyer, " only for swim- 
ming or creeping." 2 It is stated in the "Lake Superior" 

1 Permians. — W- S. S. 

2 The Archegosauri are related to the Batrachians and Sauroid fishes, 
according to Owen, " Siluria," new edition, p. 363. — W. S. S. 

20* 



234 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

of Agassiz, that in a shallow expanse of the river into 
which the lake falls, skirted by flat forest-covered banks, 
and in which a long series of dreary mud-flats are covered 
by from a few inches to a few feet of water, there occurs a 
large gill-furnished salamander (Menobranchus), which the 
Indians call the " walking fish," and which even to them is 
a great curiosity. It swims wherever there is sufficient 
depth of water, and creeps over the mud-flats where there 
is not ; and, compared with the swift and powerful Lepi- 
dosteus, a reptile-fish of the same stream, it is a stupid, 
sluggish, inert creature, safe only in its uselessness and the 
repulsiveness of its appearance. And, judging from the 
feebleness of its limbs, and the shortness of its ribs, which 
resemble, says Professor Owen, those of the half-lunged, 
half-gilled Proteus, such seems to have been the character 
of the Archegosaurus. Its contemporary, the American 
Cheiratherium, as shown by its well-defined footprints, 
must have been a stronger limbed and larger reptile, — a 
batrachian heightened by a dash of the crocodile; and, 
though probably often a dweller in the water, the only 
vestiges of it which remain show that it must have occa- 
sionally stepped out of its river or lake, to take an airing 
on the banks. Such is nearly the sum total of our knowl- 
edge regarding the reptiles of the Carboniferous period. 1 
Like mammals in the preceding Secondary ages, they 
formed so inconspicuous a feature of the fauna of the 
time, that until very recently it escaped notice, and so 
was not recognized as a feature at all. So far as we yet 

1 Lord Enniskillen possesses a fossil reptile allied to the Cheriotherium 
from the Yorkshire coal-fields, the Parabatrachus Colei (Owen). A Laby- 
rinthodont reptile, Baphates planiceps (Owen), has been found in the Nova 
Scotia coal-fields. Also footmarks of sairroid reptiles have been discovered 
in Scotland by Mr. Hugh Miller, and in the Forest of Dean by Mr. C. 
Bromby. — W. S. S. 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 235 

know, the great Secondary division, in which reptiles, both 
in size and number, received their fullest development, had 
but few genera of mammals, — a small pouched animal, 
and small insectivorous ones : so far as we yet know, the 
great Palaeozoic division, in which fishes, both in size and 
number, received their fullest development, had but its 
two genera of reptiles, both allied, apparently, to the hum- 
ble batrachian order. The reigning dynasty of the one 
period, though the mammal was present, was not that of 
the mammal, but of the reptile : the reigning dynasty of 
the other period, though the reptile was present, was not 
that of the reptile, but of the fish. 

The fishes of the Coal Measures, in especial the reptile 
fishes, were in truth very high types of their class. I have 
already incidentally said, that with the humble Menobran- 
chus or salamander of the great North American lakes 
and their tributaries, there is a true reptile fish associated ; 
— an order of creatures of which, so far as is yet known, 
there exists in the present creation only a single genus. 
It would almost seem as if the Lepidosteus had been 
spared, amid the wreck of genera and species, to serve us 
as a key by which to unlock the marvels of the ichthyol- 
ogy of those remote j>eriods of geologic history appropri- 
ated to the dynasty of the fish. This wonderful creature 
is covered by scales, not of a horny substance, like those 
of the fish common at our tables, but of solid bone, enam- 
elled, like the human teeth, on their outer surfaces. Its 
own teeth are planted in double rows of unequal size, the 
larger being of a reptilian, the smaller of an ichthyic char- 
acter; and the front teeth of the lower jaw are received, 
as in the alligators, into sheath-like cavities in the upper 
jaw, — another reptilian trait. Its vertebral column, wholly 
unlike that of other fishes, each of whose vertebra? con- 



236 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

sists of a double cup, is formed of vertebrae one end of 
which consists of a cup and another of a ball, — a charac- 
teristic of the snake ; it possesses true gills, like all other 
fishes ; but then it also possesses a peculiar form of cellular 
air-bladder, opening into the throat by a glottis, which, 
according to Agassiz, our highest authority, performs res- 
piratory functions. The Lepidosteus, says Sir Charles 
Lyell, in describing, in his second series of travels in the 
United States, an individual which he had seen, in sailing 
across Lake Solitary, leap like a trout or salmon over the 
surface, in pursuit of its prey, — "the Lepidosteus, whose 
hard shining scales are so strong and difficult to pierce 
that it can scarcely be shot, can live longer out of the 
water than any other fish of the United States, having a 
large cellular swimming-bladder, which is said almost to 
serve the purpose of a real lung." Further, we find Agas- 
siz stating, in his "Lake Superior," that the Lepidosteus is 
one of the swiftest of fishes, darting like an arrow through 
the waters, and overcoming with facility even the rapids 
of the Niagara. He adds further, that when at the latter 
place, there was a living specimen caught for him, — the 
first living specimen he had ever seen ; and that " to his 
great delight, as well as to his utter astonishment, he saw 
this fish moving its head upon its neck freely, right and 
left, and upwards, as a saurian, and as no other fish in cre- 
ation does." The true native Yankee has a mode wholly 
his own, and somewhat redolent of the revolver and the 
bowie-knife, of describing the peculiar immunities and 
high standing of the Lepidosteus, or, as he familiarly terms 
it, the gar-pike. " The gar-pike is," he says, " a happy 
fellow, and beats all fish-creation : he can hurt everything, 
and nothing can hurt him." And such is the living type 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 237. 

of what was the prevailing and dominant family of the 
fauna of the Coal Measures. 

The great size and marvellous abundance of those rep- 
tile fishes of the Carboniferous period may well excite 
wonder. One ironstone band in the neighborhood of 
Gilmerton has furnished by scores, during the last few 
years, jaws of the Rhizodus Hibberti and its congeners, of 
a mould so gigantic, that the reptile teeth which they 
contain are many times more bulky than the teeth of the 
largest crocodiles. Teeth and scales of the same genus 
are also abundant among the limestones of Burdiehouse; 
— some of the teeth much worn, as if they had belonged 
to very old individuals and some of the scales, which 
were as largely imbricated as those of the haddock or 
salmon, full five inches in diameter, 'the broken remains 
of a Burdiehouse specimen now in the museum of the 
Royal Society of Edinburgh are supposed by Agassiz to 
have formed part of one of the largest of true fishes, — a 
fish which might be appropriately described in the sub- 
lime language applied in Job to Leviathan. If the gar- 
pike, a fish from three to four feet in length, can make 
itself so formidable, from its great strength and activity, 
and the excellence of its armor, that even the cattle and 
horses that come to drink at the water's side are scarce 
safe from its attacks, what must have been the character 
of a fish of the same reptilian order, from thirty to forty 
feet in length, furnished with teeth thrice larger than 
those of the hugest alligator, and ten times larger than 
those of the bulkiest Lepidosteus, and that was covered 
from snout to tail with an impenetrable mail of enamelled 
bone? "Canst thou play with Leviathan as with a bird? 
Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons, or his head with 
fish-spears? Who can open the doors of his face? His 



238 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

teeth are terrible round about; his scales are his pride, 
shut up together as a close seal. In his neck remaineth 
strength ; his heart is as firm as a stone, yea, as hard as a 
piece of the nether millstone. The sword of him that 
layeth at him cannot hold; the spear, the dart, nor the 
habergeon. He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as 
rotten wood." 

In the same waters as the formidable and gigantic 
Holoptychean genus there lived a smaller but still very 
formidable reptile fish, now known as the Megalichthys, 
— a fish whose body was covered with enamelled quad- 
rangular scales, and its head with enamelled plates, both 
of so exquisite a polish, that they may still be occasionally 
seen in the shale of a coalpit, catching the rays of the 
sun, and reflecting them across the landscape, as is often 
done by bits of highly-glazed earthernware or glass. It 
was accompanied by another and still smaller, but very 
handsome, and scarce less highly enamelled, genus of the 
sauroid class, — the Diplopter us. And if, after the lapse 
of so many ages, their armor still retains a polish so high, 
we may be well assured that brightly must it have glit- 
tered to the sun when the creatures leaped of old into the 
air, like the Lepidosteus of Lake Solitary, after some 
vagrant ephemera or wandering dragon-fly ; and brightly 
must the reflected light have flashed into the dark recesses 
of the old overhanging forest that rose thick and tangled 
over the lake or river side. The other ichthyic contempo- 
raries of these fishes were very various in size and aspect. 
About half their number belonged to the same ganoidal 
or bone-covered order as the Holoptychius and Mega- 
lichthys, and the other half to that placoidal order repre- 
sented in our existing seas by the sharks and rays. The 
lakes, rivers, and estuaries abounded, perhaps exclusively, 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 239 

in ganoids, such as the Palwoniscus, a small, handsome, 
well-proportioned genus, containing several species, — the 
Eurynotus, a rather longer and deeper genus, formed 
somewhat in the proportions of the modern bream, — and 
the Acanthodes, an elongated, spined, small-scaled genus, 
formed in the proportions of the ling or conger eel. On 
the other hand, the seas of the period, abundant also in 
ganoids, were tenanted by numerous and obsolete families 
of sharks, amply furnished both with razor-like teeth in 
their jaws for cutting, and millstone-like teeth on their 
palates for crushing, — furnished, some of them, with 
barbed stings, like the sting-rays, — and whose dorsal fins 
were armed with elaborately carved spines. The only 
representative of any of these genera of marine placoids 
which still exists, is the Cestracion, or Port-Jackson shark, 
a placoid of the southern hemisphere. 

We know that over the rivers and lakes inhabited by 
the ganoidal fishes of this period there fluttered several 
species of Lisects mounted on gauze wings, like the Ephe- 
meridoe of the present day. At least one of their number 
must have been of considerable size ; a single wing pre- 
served in ironstone, though not quite complete, is longer 
than the anterior wing of one of our largest dragon-flies, 
and about twice as broad; and, as its longitudinal nervures 
are crossed at nearly right angles by transverse ones, it 
must have resembled, when attached to the living animal, 
a piece of delicate net-work. In the woods, and among 
the decaying trunks, there harbored at the same time 
several species of snouted beetles, somewhat akin to the 
diamond beetles of the tropics ; and with these, large, 
many-eyed scorpions. The marshes abounded in minute 
crustaceans, of, however, a low order, that bore their gills 
attached to their feet, and breathed the more freely the 



240 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

more merrily they danced; and the seas contained the 
last of the trilobites. I have already referred incidentally 
to the shells. The fresh waters contained various forms 
of Unio, somewhat similar to the pearl mussels of our 
rivers ; the profounder depths of the sea had their brachi- 
pocls, — Spirifers and Producta; while molluscs of a higher 
order — Orthoceratites, some of them of a gigantic size, 
Nautilus, and Goniatite, — swam above. Corals of strange 
shapes were abundant : there were several species of 
Tubilipora, which more resembled the organ-pipe coral 
than aught else that still exists; with great numbers of 
a horn-shaped coral, Turbinolia, with its point turned 
downwards, like that of a Cornucopia, and with an animal 
somewhat akin to the sea-anemone, expanded, flower-like, 
from its upper end. With these, too, there were grouped 
delicately branched corals, mottled with circular cells; and 
minutely elegant Fenestrella, that seemed reduced editions 
of the sea-fan. An antiquely-formed sea-urchin, whose 
spines were themselves roughened with minuce spines, as 
the more delicate branches of a sweet brier are roughened 
with thorns, crept slowly among these zoophytes by its 
many cable-like tentacula ; while forests of Crinoidea 
waved in the tide, and sent abroad their many arms from 
the ledges overhead. These forests of Crinoidea or 
stone-lilies formed one of the leading characteristics of 
the sea-bottoms of the period. We may conceive of them 
as thickets of flexible-jointed stems rooted to the rocks, 
and with a variously-formed star-fish fixed on the top of 
each stem. Some of the stems were branched, some 
simple ; in some the petals or rays were richly palmated ; 
in others, plain and star-like ; in some, what might be 
deemed the calyx of the flower, but which was in reality 
the stomach of the animal, was round and polished; in 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 241 

others, ornately carved into regular geometrical figures. 
But, however various in their appearances, they were all 
sedentary star-fishes, that, poised on their tall, cane-like 
stems, sent abroad their arms into the waters of the old 
Carboniferous ocean, in quest of food. The minute joints 
of the stem, perforated in the middle by a circular passage, 
and fretted by thick-set rays radiating from the centre, 
seem to have attracted notice in an early age, and are 
known in legendary lore as the beads of St. Cuthbert. 
Dr. Mantell states that he has found quantities of these 
perforated ossicula, which had been worn as ornaments, 
in tumuli of the ancient Britons. And you will remem- 
ber that in "Marmion," the nuns of St. Hilda, who lived 
in a Liassic country, rich in Ammonites, had their stories 
regarding the snakes which their sainted patroness had 
changed into stone ; and that they were curious to know, 
in turn, from the nuns of Lendisferne, who lived in a Car- 
boniferous district, rich in encrinites, the true story of the 
beads of St. Cuthbert. 

" But fain St. Hilda's nuns would learn, 
If on a rock by Lendisferne, 
St. Cuthbert sits, and toils to frame 
The sea-born beads that bear his name. 
Such tales had Whitby's fishers told, 
And said they might his shape behold, 

And hear his anvil sound. 

A deadened clang, a huge dim form, 

Seen but and heard, when gathering storm 

And night were closing round." 

Certainly, if he fabricated all the beads, he must have 
been one of the busiest saints in the Calendar. So amaz- 
ingly abundant were the lily encrinites of the Carbon- 
iferous period, that there are rocks in the neighborhood 

21 



242 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

of Edinburgh of considerable thickness and great lateral 
extent, composed almost exclusively of their remains. 

The depth of the Carboniferous system has been well 
described as enormous. Including the Mountain Lime- 
stone, which is a marine deposit of the same period, and 
which must be regarded as forming a member of the Coal 
Measures, there are districts of England in which, as esti- 
mated by Mantel], it has attained the vast thickness of 
ten thousand feet. In our own immediate neighborhood 
it does not, as estimated by a high authority, Mr. Charles 
Maclaren, quite equal half that depth. Our Carboniferous 
system, including the Roslyn and Calciferous sandstones, 
he describes, in his " Geology of Fife and the Lothians," 
as about four thousand five hundred feet in thickness, — a 
thickness, however, which more than equals the height of 
Ben Nevis over the level of the sea. That coal-basin 
which extends along the flat, richly cultivated plain which 
stretches from the south-eastern flanks of Arthur Seat 
to the Garlton Hills in Haddingtonshire, considerably 
exceeds three thousand feet in depth ; and, could it be 
cleared out to the bottom of the Calciferous sandstones, 
and divested of the hundred and seventy beds of which 
it consists, as we have seen the deep hollow of the Com- 
pensation Pond divested of its water, it would form by 
far the profoundest valley in Scotland. Of the beds by 
which it is occupied, it is estimated that about thirty are 
coal, varying from several feet to but a few inches in thick- 
ness; and we now know, that though some of the coal- 
seams were formed of drifted plants and trees deposited 
in the sandy bottom of some great lake or inland sea, by 
much the greater number are underlaced by bands of an 
altered vegetable soil, thickly traversed by roots ; and 
that, as in the case of many of our larger mosses, the 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 243 

plants which entered into their composition must have 
grown and decayed on the spot. And of course, when 
the plants were growing, the stratum in which they occur, 
though subsequently buried beneath plummet sound, or 
at least thousands of feet, must have formed a portion 
of the surface of the country either altogether subaerial, or, 
if existing as a swamp, overlaid by a few inches of water. 
"We have evidence of nearly the same kind in the ripple- 
markings, which are so abundant throughout all the shales 
and sandstones of the Coal Measures, from top to bottom, 
and which are never formed save where the water is shal- 
low. Stratum after stratum in the whole ten thousand 
feet included in the system, where it is mostly largely 
developed, must have formed in succession the surface 
either of the dry land or of shallow lakes or seas ; one 
bed must have sunk ere the bed immediately over it could 
have been deposited ; and thus, throughout an extended 
series of ages, a process must have been taking place on 
the face of the globe somewhat analogous to that which 
takes place during a severe frost in those deeper lakes of 
the country that never freeze, and in which the surface 
stratum, in consequence of becoming heavier as it becomes 
colder than the nether strata, is forever sinking, and thus 
making way for other strata, that cease to be the surface 
in turn. This sinking process, though persistent in the 
main, must have been of an intermittent and irregular 
kind. In some instances, forests seem to have grown on 
vast platforms, that retained their level unchanged for 
centuries, nay, thousands of years together ; in other cases 
the submergence seems to have been sudden, and to such 
a depth, that the sea rushed in and occupied wide areas 
where the land had previously been, and this to so consid- 
erable a depth, and for so extended a period, that the 



244 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

ridges of coral which formed, and the forests of Encrinites 
which grew, in these suddenly hollowed seas, composed 
thick beds of marine limestone, which we now find inter- 
calated with coal-seams and lacustrine silts and shales. 
There seem, too, to have been occasional upward move- 
ments on a small scale. The same area which had been 
occupied first by a forest, and then by a lake or sea, came 
to be occupied by a forest again ; and, though of course 
mere deposition might have silted up the lake or sea to 
the level of the water, it is not easy to conceive how, with- 
out positive upheaval for at least a few feet, such surfaces 
at the water-level should have become sufficiently consol- 
idated for the production of gigantic Araucarians and 
Pines. But the sinking condition was the general one ; 
platform after platform disappeared, as century after cen- 
tury rolled away, impressing upon them their character 
as they passed ; and so the Coal Measures, where deepest 
and most extensive, consist, from bottom to top, of these 
buried platforms, ranged like the sheets of a work in the 
course of printing, that, after being stamped by the press- 
man, are then placed horizontally over one another in a 
pile. Another remarkable circumstance, which seems a 
direct result of the same physical conditions of our planet 
as those ever-recurring subsidences, is the vast horizontal 
extent and persistency of these platforms. The Appala- 
chian Coal formation in the United States has been traced 
by Professor Henry Rogers over an area considerably 
more extensive than that of all Great Britain ; and yet 
there are some of its beds that seem continuous through- 
out. The great Pittsburg coal-seam of this field — a 
seam wonderfully uniform in its thickness, of from eight 
to twelve feet — must have once covered a surface of 
ninety thousand square miles. And this characteristic of 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 245 

persistency, united to a great extent, in the various plat- 
forms of the Coal Measures, and of ever-recurring sub- 
sidence and depression, which accumulated one surface 
platform over another for hundreds and thousands of feet, 
belongs, I am compelled to hold, to a condition of things 
no longer witnessed on the face of the globe. The earth 
has still its morasses, its deltas, its dismal swamps ; it has 
still, too, its sudden subsidences of surface, by which tracts 
of forest have been laid under water; but morasses and 
deltas cover only very limited tracts, and sudden sub- 
sidences are at once very exceptional and merely local 
occurrences. Subsidence during the Carboniferous ages, 
though interrupted by occasional periods of rest, and occa- 
sional paroxysms of upheaval, seems, on the contrary, to 
have been one of the fixed and calculable processes of 
nature; and, from apparently the same cause, persistent 
swamps, and accumulations of vegetable matter, that equal- 
led continents in their extent, formed one of the common 
and ordinary features of the time. 

My subject is one on which great diversity of opinion 
may and does prevail. But, while entertaining a thorough 
respect for the judgment and the high scientific acquire- 
ments of geologists who hold that the earth existed at 
this early period in the same physical conditions as it does 
now, I must persist in believing that these conditions 
were in one important respect essentially different ; I must 
persist in believing that our planet was greatly more plastic 
and yielding than in these later times; and that the mol- 
ten abyss from which all the Plutonic rocks were derived, 
— that abyss to whose existence the earthquakes of the 
historic period and the recent volcanoes so significantly 
testify, — was enveloped by a crust comparatively thin. 
Like the thin ice of the earlier winter frosts, that yields 

21* 



24:6 LECTURES ON QEOLOGY. 

Tinder the too adventurous skater, it could not support 
great weights, — table-lands such as now exist, or moun- 
tain chains ; and hence, apparently, the existence of vast 
swampy plains nearly level with the sea, and ever-recur- 
ring periods of subsidence, wherever a course of deposi- 
tion had overloaded the surface. The yet further fact, 
that as we ascend into the middle and earlier Palaeozoic 
periods, the traces of land become less and less frequent, 
until at length scarce a vestige of a terrestrial plant or 
animal occurs in entire formations, seems charged with a 
corroborative evidence. I shall not say that in these 
primeval periods 

" A shoreless ocean tumbled round the globe," 

for the terrestrial plants of the Silurians show that land 
existed in even the earliest ages in which, so far as the 
geologist knows, vitality was associated with matter ; but 
it would seem that only a few insulated parts of the 
earth's surface had got their heads above water at the 
time. The thin and partially consolidated crust could not 
bear the load of great continents; nor were the "moun- 
tains yet settled, nor the hills brought forth." It would 
seem that not until the Carboniferous ages did there exist 
a period in which the slowly-ripening planet could exhibit 
any very considerable breadth of land; and even then it 
seems to have been a land consisting of immense flats, 
unvaried, mayhap, by a single hill, in which dreary swamps, 
inhabited by doleful creatures, spread out on every hand 
for hundreds and thousands of miles, and a gigantic and 
monstrous vegetation formed, as I have shown, the only 
prominent feature of the scenery. Burnett held that the 
earth, previous to the Flood, was one vast plain, without 
hill or valley, and that Paradise itself, like the Women 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 247 

garten of a wealthy Dutch burgomaster, was curiously 
laid out upon a flat. We would all greatly prefer the 
Paradise of Milton : 

" A happy rural seat of various views, 
Where lawns and level downs, whitened with flocks 
Grazing the tender herb, were interposed 
With palmy hillocks and irrageous vales 
Luxuriant; and where murmuring waters fell 
Down the steep hills dispersed, or in blue lakes 
Embraced the fringed banks, with myrtle crowned/' 

It was during the times of the Coal Measures that Burnett 
would have found his idea of a perfect earth most nearly 
realized, in at least general outline ; but even he would 
scarce have deemed it a paradise. Its lands were lands in 
which, according to the Prophet, there " could no man 
have dwelt, nor son of man passed through." From some 
tall tree-top the eye would have wandered, without rest- 
ing-place, over a wilderness of rank, unwholesome morass, 
dank with a sombre vegetation, that stretched on and 
away from the foreground to the distant horizon, and for 
hundreds and hundreds of leagues beyond; the woods 
themselves, tangled, and dank, and brown, would, accord- 
ing to the poet, have " breathed a creeping horror o'er the 
frame;" the surface, even where most consolidated, would 
have exhibited its frequent ague-fits and earth-waves; and, 
after some mightier earthquake had billowed the landscape, 
dashing together the crests of tall trees and gigantic 
shrubs, there would be a roar, as of many waters, heard 
from the distant outskirts of the scene, and one long wall 
of breakers seen stretching along the line where earth and 
sky meet, — stretching inwards, and travelling onwards 
with yet louder and louder roar, — Calamite and Uloden- 
dron, Sigillaria and Tree-fern, disappearing amid the foam, 



248 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

— until at length all would be submerged, and only here 
and there a few Araucarian tops seen over a sea without 
visible shore. Such was the character, and such were the 
revolutions, of the land of the Carboniferous era, — a land 
that seems to have been called into being less for the sake 
of its own existence than for that of the existences of the 
future. 



LECTURE SIXTH. 

Remote Antiquity of the Old Red Sandstone — Suggestive of the vast Tracts of 
Time with which the Geologist has to deal — Its great Depth and Extent in 
Scotland and England — Peculiarity of its Scenery — Reflection on first dis- 
covering the Outline of a Fragment of the Asterolepis traced on one of its 
Rocks — Consists of Three Distinct Formations — Their Vegetable Organisms 
— The Caithness Flagstones, how formed — The Fauna of the Old Red Sand- 
stone — The Pterichthys of the Upper or Newest Formation — The Cephalaspis 
of the Lower Formation — The Middle Formation the most abundant in Or- 
ganic Remains — Destruction of Animal Life in the Formation sudden and 
violent — The Asterolepis and Coccosteus — The Silurian the Oldest of the 
Geologic Systems — That in which Animal and Vegetable Life had their earliest 
beginnings — The Theologians and Geologists on the Antiquity of the Globe — 
Extent of the Silurian System in Scotland — The Classic. Scenery of the Coun- 
try situated on it — Comparatively Poor in Animal and Vegetable Organisms — 
The Unfossiliferous Primary Rocks of Scotland — Its Highland Scenery formed 
of them — Description of Glencoe — Other Highland Scenery glanced at — 
Probable Depth of the Primary Stratifie.d Rocks of Scotland — How deposited 
— Speculations of Philosophers regarding the Processes to which the Earth 
owes its present Form — The Author's Views on the subject. 

I incidentally mentioned, when describing the Oolitic 
productions of our country, that the shrubs and trees of 
this Secondary period grew, on what is now the east coast 
of Sutherland, in a soil which rested over rocks of Old 
Red Sandstone, and was composed mainly, like that of the 
county of Caithness in the present day, of the broken de- 
bris of this ancient system. We detect fragments of the 
Old Red flagstones still fast jammed among the petrified 
roots of old Oolitic trees ; we find their water-rolled peb- 
bles existing as a breccia, mixed up with the bones of huge 
Oolitic reptiles and the shells of extinct Oolitic molluscs ; 



250 ( LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

we even find some of its rounded masses incrusted over 
with the corals of the Oolite : the masses had existed in 
that remote age of the world as the same gray indurated 
blocks of stone that we find them now ; and busy Mad- 
reporites, — Isastraea and Thamnastraea, — whose species 
have long since perished, built up their stony cells on the 
solid foundations which the masses furnished. Nay, within 
the close compressed folds of these flagstones lay their 
many various fossils, — glittering scale, and sharp spine, 
and cerebral buckler, — in exactly the same state of keep- 
ing as now ; and had there been a geologist to take ham- 
mer in hand in that Oolitic period, when the spikes of the 
JPinites JEiggensis were green upon the living tree, and the 
Equisetum columnare waved its tall head to the breeze, 
he would have found in these stones the organisms of a 
time that would have seemed as remote then as it does in 
the present late age of the world. We may well apply to 
this incalculably ancient Old Red system what Words- 
worth says of his old Cumberland beggar — . 

" Whom from his childhood had he known, that then 
He was so old, he seemed not older now." 

This glimpse, through the medium of the high antiquity 
of the Oolite, of an antiquity vastly higher still, — that of 
the Old Red Sandstone, — may well impress us with the 
enormous extent of those tracts in time with which the 
geological historian is called on to deal. There are some 
of the lesser planets that seem to the naked eye quite as 
distant as many of those fixed stars whose parallax the 
astronomer has failed to ascertain ; bat when they come 
into a state of juxtaposition, and the moveless star is seen 
dimly .through the atmosphere of the moving planet, we 
are taught how enormous must be those tracts of space 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 251 

which intervene between them, and keep them apart. 
And it is thus with the periods of the geologist. Even 
the comparatively near are so distant, that the remote 
seem scarce more so ; but the dead and stony antiquity of 
one system, seen as if through the living nature of another, 
enables us, in at least some degree, to appreciate the vast- 
ness of those cycles by which they were separated. It is 
farther interesting, too, thus to find one antiquity curiously 
inlaid, as it were, in another. We feel as if, amid the an- 
cient relics of a Ponrpeii or a Herculaneum, we had stum- 
bled on the cabinet of some Eoman antiquary, filled with 
bronze and granite memorials of the first Pharaohs, or of 
the old hunter king who founded Nineveh; — things that 
in times which we now deem ancient had been treasured 
up as already grown venerably old. 

The Old Red Sandstone underlies the Coal Measures, 
and is, in Scotland at least, still more largely developed 
than these, both in depth and lateral extent. In Caithness 
and Orkney, one of the three great formations of which it 
consists has attained to a thickness that equals the height 
of our highest hills over the sea. 1 The depth of the entire 
system in England has been estimated by Sir Roderick 
Murchison at ten thousand feet ; and as these ten thousand 
feet include three formations so distinct in their groups of 
animal life that not a species of fish has been found com- 
mon to both higher and lower, it must represent in the 
history of the globe an enormously protracted period of 
time. 

The scenery of the Old Red Sandstone we find much 
affected to the south of the Grampians, like that of the 
Coal Measures, by the presence of the trap rocks ; but in 

1 The Caithness flagstones and their ichthyolites constitute, according 
to Sir R. Murchison, the central portion of the Old Red group. — W. S. S. 



252 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

the north, where there is no trap, it bears a character 
decidedly its own. It is remarkable for rectilinear ridges, 
elongated for miles, that, when they occur in semi-Highland 
districts, where the primary rocks have been heaved into 
wave-like hills, or ascend into boldly-contoured mountains, 
constitute a feature noticeable for the contrast which it 
forms to all the other features of the scene. In approach- 
ing the eastern coast of Caithness from the south, the 
voyager first sees a mountain country, — the land piled up 
stern and high, — the undulations bold and abrupt. He is 
looking on the Highlands of Sutherlandshire. All at once, 
however, the aspect of the landscape changes; — the bro- 
ken and wavy line suddenly descends to a comparatively 
low level, and, wholly altering its character, stretches away 
to the north, straight as a tightened cord, or as if described 
by a ruler. Caithness, thus seen in profile, reminds one of 
a long, thin proboscis, or mesmerized arm, stretched stiffly 
out from the Highlands to the distant Orkneys. In sailing 
upwards along the Moray Frith, the line which defines 
seawards the plain of Easter Ross, from the Hill of Nigg 
to the low rocky promontory of Tarbat, topped by its 
lighthouse, presents nearly the same rectilinear character. 
Another long straight line which meets the eye on enter- 
ing the bay of Cromarty, stretches westwards from the hill 
of granitic gneiss immediately over the town, and runs for 
many miles into the interior, along the bleak ridge of the 
Black Isle. Yet another rectilinear line may be seen run- 
ning on the south side of the Moray Frith, from beyond 
the Moor of Culloden, which it includes, to the eastern 
end of Loch Ness. And in all these instances the rectili- 
near ridges are composed of Old Red Sandstone. On 
some localities on the seaboard of the country, the system 
is much traversed by friths and bays, and what in Caith- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 253 

ness and Orkney are termed goes, — narrow inlets in the 
line of faults, along which the waves find straight passage 
far into the interior. From the Hill of Nigg, the centre of 
an Old Red Sandstone district, the eye at once commands 
three noble friths, all scooped out of the deposit, — the 
Frith of Cromarty, the Dornoch Frith, and the upper 
reaches of the Moray Frith. It commands, too, what is 
scarce less a feature of the Old Red system, — the rich 
corn-bearing plains of Moray and of Easter Ross ; and from 
the union which the prospect exhibits of two elements dis- 
sociated elsewhere in the country, — the rich softness of a 
Lowland scene, with numerous arms of the sea, character- 
istic elsewhere, as on the western coast, of a Highland one, 
— it forms a landscape unique among the landscapes of 
Scotland. But perhaps the most striking scenic peculiari- 
ties of the Old Red Sandstone are to be found in its rock- 
pieces. The Old Man of Hoy, with its mural rampart of 
precipices, not unfurnished with turret and tower, and wide 
yawning portals, and that rise a thousand feet over the 
waves ; the tall stacks of Cannisbay, ornately Gothic in 
their style of ornament, with the dizzy chasms of the 
neighboring headland, in which the tides of the Pentland 
Frith forever eddy and boil, and the surf forever roars ; 
and the strangely fractured precipices of Holburn Head, 
where, through dark crevice and giddy chasm, the gleam 
of the sun may be seen reflected far below on the green 
depths of the sea, and, venerable and gray, like some vast 
cathedral, a dissevered fragment of the coast descried rising 
beyond, — are all rock-scenes of the Old Red Sandstone. 
When I last stood on the heights of Holburn, there was a 
heavy surf toiling far below along the base of the over- 
hanging wall of cliff which lines the coast; and deep under 
my feet I could hear a muffled roaring amid the long, cor- 

22 



254 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

ridor-like caves into which the headland is hollowed, and 
which, opening to the light and air far inland, by narrow 
vents and chasms, send up at such seasons, high over the 
blighted sward, clouds of impalpable spray, that resemble 
the smoke of great chimneys. As I peered into one of 
these profound gulfs, and dimly marked, hundreds of feet 
below, the upward dash of the foam, gray in the gloom ; 
as I looked, and experienced, with the gaze, that mingled 
emotion natural amid such scenes which Burke so well 
analyzes as a consciousness of great expansiveness and 
dimension, associated with a sense of danger, — my eye 
caught, on the verge of the precipice, the outline of part 
of an old reptile fish traced on the rock. It was the cra- 
nial buckler of one of the hugest ganoids of the Old Red 
Sandstone, — the Asterolepis. And there it lay, as it had 
been deposited, far back in the bypast eternity, at the bot- 
tom of a muddy sea. But the mud existed now as a dense 
gray rock, hard as iron ; and what had been the bottom of 
a Palaeozoic sea had become the edge of a dizzy precipice, 
elevated more than a hundred yards over the surf. The 
world must have been a very different world, I said, when 
that creature lived, from what it is now. There could have 
been no such precipices then. A few flat islands comprised, 
in all probability, the whole dry land of the globe ; and 
that emotion of which I have just been conscious, is it not 
something new in creation also? The deep gloom of these 
perilous gulfs, these incessant roarings, these dizzy preci- 
pices, the sublime roll of these huge waves, — are they not 
associated in my mind with a certain dim idea of danger, 
— a feeling of incipient terror, which, in all God's creation, 
man, and man only, is organized to experience ? Is it not 
an emotion which neither the inferior animals on the one 
hand, nor the higher spiritual existences on the other, can 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 255 

in the least feel, — an emotion dependent on the union of 
a living soul with a fragile body of clay, easily broken ? 

The Old Red Sandstone consists, as I have said, of three 
great formations, furnished each, in Scotland at least, with 
its peculiar group of fossils. In the upper division — that 
which rests immediately under the Carboniferous system 
— a few straggling plants of the Coal Measures have been 
occasionally found ; but, so far as I know, no plant peculiar 
to itself. In the middle (lower) division we find traces of 
a peculiar but very meagre flora. I detected about ten 
years ago, among the gray micaceous sandstones of For- 
farshire, a fucoid furnished with a thick, squat stem, that 
branches into numerous divergent leaflets or fronds of a 
slim, grass-like form, and which, as a whole, somewhat 
resembles the scourge of cords attached to a handle with 
which a boy whips his top. And Professor Fleming de- 
scribes a still more remarkable vegetable organism of the 
same formation, which, to employ his own well-selected 
words, " occurs in the form of circular flat patches, com- 
posed each of numerous smaller contiguous circular pieces, 
altogether not unlike what might be expected to result 
from a compressed berry, such as the bramble or rasp." 1 
In the lowest (middle) division of the Old Red traces of 
land plants become very rare. Many years ago, at Crom- 
arty, I detected, in one of its oldest fossiliferous beds, a 
fragment of a cone-bearing tree, remarkable as being the 
oldest piece of wood ever found, that, when subjected to 
the microscope, exhibits the true ligneous structure ; and 
I possess a small specimen from Skaill, in the mainland of 
Orkney, also detected in one of the lower beds, which 

i Parka decipiens. See " Testimony of the Rocks," latest edition. For 
notice of a Lepidodendron occurring in the Forfarshire sandstone, see like, 
wise " Testimony of the Rocks," page 445 — 7. — L. M. 



256 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

formed, apparently, a portion of some nameless fern ; but 
the other vegetable remains of the lower {middle) division, 
though sufficiently abundant in some localities to give a 
fissile character to the rock in which they occur, are, with 
one doubtful exception, all marine. They were the weeds 
of a widely extended sea, in which land was at once very 
unfrequent and of very limited extent. In the neighbor- 
hood of Thurso my attention has been attracted for sev- 
eral years past by a curious appearance among the flag- 
stones of the district, — there enormously developed, — 
which I am disposed to regard as indications of the exist- 
ence of vast mud flats of the Old Red Sandstone, that 
occasionally showed their surfaces above water for perhaps 
weeks and months at a time, but which were, in every 
instance, submerged ere they acquired coverings of terres- 
trial vegetation. The flagstones, now known very exten- 
sively over Europe as the Caithness flag of commerce, 
must have been deposited at the bottom of a shallow sea, 
in the form of beds of arenaceous mud, largely charged 
with organic matter. They abound in minute ripple- 
markings, which could have been formed only a few feet, 
or at most a few fathoms, under the surface ; and between 
these rippled bands, for a series of beds together, there 
occur bands which had been evidently subjected to a dry- 
ing process, so that, as happens with the bottom of a 
muddy pool laid dry during the summer droughts, they 
cracked into irregularly polygonal divisions ; and as, when 
again submerged, a sudden deposition filled up the cracks, 
we can still trace these marks of desiccation as distinctly 
in the stone as if they had been made by the sun of the 
previous week. Hall, of Leicester, spoke, in one of his 
illustrations, of "a continent of mud;" and it would seem 
that in the earlier ages of the Old Red Sandstone, conti- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 257 

nents of mud were not mere figures of speech, but that, 
over dark-hued and shallow seas, mud-banks of vast extent 
occasionally raised their flat dingy backs, and remained 
hardening in the hot sun until their oozy surfaces had 
cracked and warped, and become hard as the sun-baked 
brick of eastern countries ; and that then, ere the seeds 
of terrestrial plants, floated from some distant island, or 
wafted in the air, had found time to strike root into the 
crevices of the soil, some of the frequent earth-tremors 
of the age shook the flat expanse under the water out of 
which it had arisen, and the waves rippled over it as 
before. The features of a scene so tame and unattractive 
— features which none of the poets, save perhaps the 
truthful Crabbe, would have ventured to portray — will 
not strike you as very worthy of preservation. There is 
certainly not much to excite or gratify the fancy in a scene 
of wide yet shallow seas, here and there darkened by for- 
ests of algae, and here and there cumbered by archipelagos 
of flat, verdureless islands of mud that harden in the sun ; 
but, regarded as embryo and rudimentary land, even these 
mud-banks may be found to possess their modicum of 
interest. And we know that in the shallows of that 
muddy sea, the Creator wrought with all his wonted wis- 
dom and inexhaustible fertility of resource, in the produc- 
tion of a dynasty of fishes of very extraordinary form, but 
high type, and which manifested exquisite faculties of 
adaptation to the circumstances in which they were placed. 
In glancing at the fauna of the Old Red Sandstone, let 
us imagine three great platforms from which the sea' has 
just retired, leaving them strewn over with its spoils, — 
chiefly fishes. These platforms represent the three great 
periods of the system; and in each do we find the group 
specifically, and in several instances generically, distinct. 

22* 



2,j% LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

In the upper or newer platform — that immediately under 
the Coal Measures — there occur several species of Holoj}- 
tychius, all of them of smaller dimensions than the giant 
of the Carboniferous system, but, in proportion to their 
bulk and size, even more strongly armed. With the Ho- 
loptychius there was associated a fish of the same Cela- 
canth family, the Bathriolepis, and several curious fishes 
of what is known as the Dipterian family, such as the 
Stagonolepis 1 and Glyptolepis. It contains also at least 
three species of Pterichthys. One of these, the Pterich- 
thys major, which occurs in the upper sandstones of 
Moray, is of greater size than any of the others its con- 
temporaries, or than any of the older species ; as if, in at 
least point of bulk, the creature received its fullest devel- 
opment just when on the eve of passing away. 2 This 
strange Pterichthyan genus first appears at the base of the 
Old Red Sandstone, and disappears with its upper beds. 
It is peculiarly and characteristically the distinctive organ- 
ism of the system, for in no other system does it occur ; 
and it has a yet further claim on our notice here, from the 
extreme singularity of its construction. "It is impossi- 
ble," says Agassiz, in his great work on fossil fishes, " it 
is impossible to find anything more eccentric in the whole 

1 The Stagonolepis is now under examination as to whether it is to be 
ranked as fish or reptile. Sir R. Murchison mentions this in his last 
address to the Leeds British Association, as still undetermined. — L. M. 

2 Associated with this large Pterichthys are now found not only the 
Telerpeton Elginense, a small tortoise, but footprints of larger reptiles, 
some only of greater size than the Telerpeton, others considered to ap- 
proach more nearly in bulk and conformation to some of those of the 
succeeding eras. When I lately visited the Museum at Elgin, I was grat- 
ified by seeing sandstone slabs bearing the traces of each of these ; but I 
was told that the best specimens had been sent to London for examination. 
It is probable that they will have been lawfully named and surnamed by 
the savants ere the next edition of this work is ready for the press. — L. M. 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 259 

creation than this genus. The same astonishment which 
Cuvier felt on examining for the first time the Plesio- 
sauri, I myself experienced when Mr. Hugh Miller, the 
original discoverer of these fossils, showed me the speci- 
mens which he had collected from the Old Red Sandstone 
of Cromarty." And we find Humboldt referring, in his 
"Cosmos," to this strange Pterichthyan genus in nearly 
the same terms. This, I suspect, is no place for strict ana- 
tomical demonstration ; and so, instead of elaborately 
describing the Pterichthys, I shall merely attempt sketch- 
ing its general outlines by the aid of a few simple illus- 
trations. When, in laying open the rock in which it lies, 
the under part is presented, as usually happens, we are 
struck with its resemblance to a human figure, with the 
arms expanded, as in the act of swimming, and the legs 
transformed, as in the ordinary figures of the mermaid, 
into a tapering tail. On further examination, we ascertain 
that the creature was cased in a complete armature of 
solid bone, but that the armor was of different construc- 
tion over the different parts. The head was covered by a 
strong helmet, perforated in front by two circular holes, 
through which the eyes looked out. The chest and back 
were protected by a curiously constructed cuirass, formed 
of plates ; and the tail sheathed in a flexible mail of osse- 
ous scales. The arms, which were also covered with 
plates, were articulated rather to the lower part of the 
head than to the shoulders; and this by what at first 
appears to be simply a ball-and-socket joint, like that of 
the human thigh, but which, on further examination, proves 
to be of a more complex character, as we find a pin-like 
protuberance from the socket finding, in turn, a socket in 
the ball. The abdomen of the creature was flat ; the dor- 
sal portions strongly arched ; and not in our Gothic roofs, 



260 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

constructed on strictly mathematical principles, do we 
discover more admirable contrivances for combining in the 
greatest degree lightness with strength, than in the arch 
of osseous plates which protected the Pterichthys. Nay, 
we find in it the two leading peculiarities of the Gothic 
roof anticipated, — the contrivance of a series of ribs that 
radiate from certain centres, and the contrivance of the 
groin. The helmet was united to the cuirass by a curious 
and yet very simple joining, that united the principle of 
the dovetail of the carpenter to that of the keystone of 
the architect. Farther, the creature, with its inflexible 
cuirass and its flexible tail, and with its two arms, that 
combined the broad blade of the paddle with the sharp 
point of the spear, might be regarded, when in motion, 
as a little subaqueous boat, mounted on two oars and a 
scull. And such was the Pterichthys, — the characteristic 
organism of the Old Red Sandstone. I may remark, in 
connection with this fish, — a remark, however, which 
bears equally on all its ganoidal contemporaries, — that 
the development of its dermal or skin-skeleton, compared 
with that of its internal one, was singularly great. In the 
present creation, with but a few exceptions, such as the 
Pangolin and Armadilla among quadrupeds, the crocodiles 
and tortoises among reptiles, and the Lepidosteus and 
Polyopterus among fishes, the dermal skeleton is but very 
slenderly represented. In our own species, for instance, 
it is represented by but the teeth, the hair, and the nails ; 
and were there no other portions of us to survive in the 
fossil state, each of the male animals among us would be 
represented by but ten toe and ten finger nails, one set of 
teeth, a periwig, and a pair of whiskers. But so complete, 
on the other hand, was the development of the dermal 
skeleton among the fishes of the Old Red Sandstone, that, 



LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 261 

though in many instances no other parts of them survive, 
we find their outlines complete in the rock from head to 
tail. Dermal plates of enamelled bone represent the head ; 
dermal scales, also of enamelled bone, lie ranged side 
by side, like tiles on a roof, in the lines in which they 
originally covered the body; and thickly-set enamelled 
rays of bone indicate the place and outline of the fins. 
As a set-off, however, against this great development of 
dermal skeleton in the ganoids of the Old Red Sandstone, 
their internal skeletons were exceedingly slight, and in 
whole families entirely cartilaginous. 

The middle (loioer) platform of the Old Red Sandstone 
has for its characteristic organism the Cephalaspis, or 
Buckler-head, — a curiously formed, bone-covered fish, 
with a thin triangular body, and crescent-shaped head, 
somewhat resembling in outline a shoemaker's cutting- 
knife. It had for its contemporaries several fishes armed 
with dorsal spines, of which only the spines remain, and 
of a gigantic Crustacean, akin, as shown by some of its 
plates, to our existing lobsters, but which in some S{)eci- 
mens must have exceeded four feet in length. 

It is, however, on the lower {middle) platform of the 
system that we find its organic remains at once most 
abundant and most characteristic. The flagstones of 
Caithness and Orkney, and the nodule-bearing beds of 
Ross, Cromarty, and Moray, contain more fossil fish than 
all the other formations of not only Scotland, but of Great 
Britain, from the Tertiary deposits down to the Mountain 
Limestone. There are strata in which they lie as thickly 
as herrings on our better fishing banks in autumn, when 
the fisherman's harvest is at its best ; and, strange to say, 
not unfrequently do the fish of a whole platform give evi- 
dence, both in their state of keeping and in their con- 



262 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

toiled attitude, that they all died at once, and died by vio- 
lent death. We see them still presenting over wide areas 
the stiff curved outline — a result of the unequal contrac- 
tion of the muscles — which, as in the case of recently 
netted herrings, marks that dissolution had been sudden. 
We find, too, that their remains did not suffer from the 
predatory attacks of other fishes: it would seem as if 
all the finny inhabitants of wide tracts of sea had been 
at once cast dead to the bottom, so that not an individual 
survived, to prey upon the remains of his deceased neigh- 
bors. It was the first remark of Agassiz, when introduced 
to a collection of fossil-fish from Orkney, — "All these fish 
died by violent death," — a remark which he again and 
yet again repeated when introduced to the Old Red ich- 
thyolites of Cromarty and Morary. We have already 
seen that the oldest plant-covered land of which the geol- 
ogist finds distinct and certain trace in this country was a 
land subject to incessant fluctuations of level, and to sud- 
den and disastrous invasions of the sea; and that, though 
suited for the production of a rank and luxuriant flora, 
whose numerous denizens lived without consciousness and 
died without suffering, or for animals fitted to enjoy the 
present without thought or fear of the future, and to whom 
life, so long as they lived, was pleasure, and death merely 
a ceasing to be, we conclude that it could have been no 
fitting home for creatures of a higher order, whose nature 
it is to look before and behind them, — before them with 
hope or with fear, behind them with satisfaction or regret. 
And these strange platforms of sudden death — of no rare 
occurrence in the marine depths of the Old Red Sand- 
stone — show that the sea in these early times was not less 
subject to disastrous catastrophe than the land, — that that 
order of nature which we now term its fixed order, and 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 263 

on whose permanency our minds have been framed to cal- 
culate, was, if I may venture the expression, enacted, but 
not enforced, and so the breaches of it were scarce more 
exceptional than the observance, — that life, greatly more 
emphatically than now, was the least certain of all things, 
— and that both in sea and on the land the young and 
immature earth, like an inexperienced and careless nurse, 
was ever and anon overlaying and smothering its off- 
spring. 

Among the various ichthyic families and genera of 
the Lower and Middle Old Red Sandstone, — Acanths, 
Dipterians, Ccelacanths, and Cephalaspians, — I shall refer 
to only two, and that in but a few brief words ; the one 
remarkable for its great size, the other for its extraordinary 
organization. The Asterolepis seems to have been one of 
at once the earliest and bulkiest of the ganoids. Cranial 
bucklers of this creature have been found in the flagstones 
of Caithness large enough to cover the front skull of an. 
elephant, and strong enough to have sent back a musket- 
bullet as if from a stone Avail. The Asterolepis must have 
at least equalled in size the largest alligators ; and there 
were several points in which it must have resembled that 
genus of reptiles. Its head was covered with strong osse- 
ous plates, ornately fretted by star-like markings, and its 
body by closely imbricated and delicately-carved osseous 
scales. But it is chiefly in its jaws that we trace a rep- 
tilian relationship to the alligators. The alligators among 
existing reptiles, and the Lepidostei among existing rep- 
tile-fishes, are remarkable for a peculiar organization of 
tooth and maxillary, through which certain long teeth in 
the anterior part of the nether jaw are received into cer- 
tain scabbard-like hollows in the anterior part of the 
upper jaw. The hollows receive the teeth when the 



264 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

mouth is shut, as the scabbard receives the sword. Now. 
in the Asterolepis this reptilian peculiarity was not re- 
stricted to a small group of the anterior teeth, but per* 
vaded the entire jaw. Beside each of the creature's rep- 
tile teeth, in both jaws, there was a deep pit, which 
received the reptile tooth opposite ; and thus, when the 
animal closed its formidable mouth, the jaws would have 
been locked together by their long teeth and deep recip- 
ient hollows, as the crenellated jaws of a fox-trap lock into 
each other when we release the spring. The other ich- 
thyolite of the Old Red Sandstone to which I shall refer 
is the Coccosteus, — a ganoid that, so far as we yet know, 
was restricted to this formation. Like the Pterichthys, 
with which it has been classed, it was provided with a 
helmet and cuirass of bony plate ; but its caudal portion 
seems to have been naked, — a peculiarity of which we 
find no other example among the ganoids of this early 
time. The Coccosteus was, however, chiefly remarkable 
for the form of its jaws. 1 More than ten years ago I ven- 
tured to state, in the first edition of a little work on the 
Old Red Sandstone, that the jaws of this ancient fish 
seemed, like those of some of the crustaceans, and of some 
of the insects, to have possessed a horizontal action. 
Aware, however, that I was on dangerous ground, I exer- 
cised, in making the statement, some little share of Scotch 
caution: the thing was, I stated, too anomalous to be 
regarded as proven by the evidence of the specimens yet 
found ; and I mentioned it, I said, with but the view of 
directing attention to it. It was a question, I thought, 
worthy of being entertained, and so I craved that it should 
be entertained, and specimens carefully examined. But 

1 The Coccosteus possessed also true bony vertebratae. See " Siluria," 
p. 504, new edition. — W. S. S. 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 265 

specimens were not examined, at least no specimens that 
threw any light on the subject; and my very modified 
statement respecting it was written clown a blunder on 
the very highest authority. I kept, however, a steady 
eye on the rocks, as the real authorities in the case ; and, 
deeming myself bound as a geologist to observe carefully 
and record truthfully whatever they revealed, but as not 
in the least responsible for the anomalies of the revela- 
tion, I persisted in quietly collecting their evidence in a 
suite of fossils, which has now fully convinced our first 
comparative anatomists that there was an anomaly in the 
structure of the jaws of this ancient fish, unique among 
the vertebrata; and that, in calling to it the attention of 
the scientific world, I was in the right, not in the wrong. 
The under jaws contained two distinct sets of teeth ; the 
one set or group in the line of the symphysis, the other 
set or group on the upper edge of the jaw, and placed on 
such different planes, that they could not possibly have 
been brought into action by the same movement of the 
condyles. And there are on the table specimens which 
show, that while the group in the customary place, the 
upper edge of the under jaw, were made to act against 
a group placed in the nether edge of the upper one by the 
usual vertical action, the groups so strangely placed in 
the symphysis, if brought into action at all, must have 
acted against each other through a lateral motion alto- 
gether unique. The jaws of the Coccosteus are interest- 
ing in another point of view, as being perhaps the oldest 
portions of any internal skeleton that have presented their 
structure to the microscope. And it is surely not unin- 
teresting to see the osseous substance, destined to perform 
so important a part in the animal economy, presenting in so 
early an age its distinguishing characteristics ; in especial, 

23 



266 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

those arterial haversion canals through which the ancient 
blood must have flown for its nourishment, and those 
numerous corpuscles of life-points from which its organi- 
zation began, and which continued to remain open as the 
sheltering cells in which its vitality resided. Was it im- 
possible, in the nature of things, we ask, that life could be 
equally diffused over hard and rigid earth built up into 
this new animal substance, bone? and was it therefore 
merely sown over it in hollow microscopic points? Is 
bone rather a thing strongly garrisoned by vitality, than 
itself vital? Direct questions cannot always, in the present 
imperfect state of our knowledge, receive answers equally 
direct ; and these are questions to which our first physiol- 
ogists might hesitate to reply. But we may at least safely 
infer, from the thorough identity of the osseous material 
throughout all ages, that it was a material compounded at 
all times by the same Architect, according to a prede- 
termined recipe ; that it is He who built up the corpuscles 
and arranged the canals in that ancient jaw which so 
excites our curiosity, that now maketh in the human 
subject "the bones to grow;" and that, in his eternal 
purposes, the existences of the most ancient times may be 
woven into the tissue of one great plan, with all that now 
exists, and with all that shall exist in the future. 

In retiring into the remote past, and descending from 
formation to formation as Ave retire, we have now reached 
that great Silurian group of rocks in which, so far as the 
geologist yet knows, fossils first appear, and which repre- 
sents a period of incalculable vastness, in which life, ani- 
mal and vegetable, seems to have had its earliest begin- 
nings on our planet. Enormous as is the depth of some 
of the other systems, — such as the Old Red and the Car- 
boniferous systems, — they shrink into moderate dimen- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 267 

sions when we compare them with the truly vast Silurian 
deposit. It was estimated only a few years ago, that the 
entire depth of all the fossiliferous strata did not much 
exceed six miles : it is now found by the geologists of the 
Government survey, that the Lower Silurian strata of 
North Wales are of themselves about five miles in depth, 
while the Upper Silurian, as estimated by Sir Roderick 
Murchison, are about a mile more. Many of the beds, 
too, of both the Upper and Lower divisions must have 
been of exceedingly slow deposition, — formed far from 
land, and at the bottom of deep seas : nay, there are Silu- 
rian Limestones that can scarce be regarded as deposits 
a.t all, seeing that every calcareous particle of which they 
are composed was at one time associated with animal life, 
as the joints of crinoidea, the calcareous framework of 
corals, or the shells of molluscs, all of which lived and 
died upon the spot that the rocks now occupy. And 
rocks of this character, when of any considerable thick- 
ness, must have been very many years in the forming. 
The sagacious Chalmers saw and taught, at the beginning 
of the present century, that " the writings of Moses do 
not fix the antiquity of the globe : " " if they fix anything 
at all," he said, " it is only the antiquity of the species." 
But there were few among either teachers or pupils who 
saw so clearly as Chalmers ; and when the geologist first 
began to demand a long tale of years for the production 
of all the stony volumes of his record, it was, like the 
long price which the ancient sibyl demanded for all her 
volumes, very decidedly refused him. Instead, however, 
of bating in the demand, or acquiescing in the denial, the 
geologists have been ever and anon returning, sibyl-like, 
to drive harder and yet harder bargains, and even to ask, 
as they do now, as much for a single volume as* they form- 



268 LECTURES Otf GEOLOGY. 

erly asked for the whole ; but their library, unlike that 
offered in sale to the old Roman, is undergoing no diminu- 
tion in bulk ; on the contrary, its volumes increase in 
number as the demand made for each is raised. But it 
is at least something to be made to feel, by means of these 
time-marks in the remote distance, that eternity is not a 
mere idle name, which at times children employ in their 
catechisms, but a great and awful fact; and that its un- 
measurable amplitude of duration closes as completely 
around the systems of the geologist in time, as the infinity 
of extension closes around the systems of the astronomer 
in space. It is one of the revealed characteristics of the 
Adorable Creator, that "from everlasting to everlasting 
he is God." 

On the western coasts of Ross and Sutherland, on a 
general basement of broken primary hills of no great alti- 
tude, we find the ( Cambrian) deposit occurring as a series 
of noble mountains, now entirely insulated from each other, 
and that yet give evidence, in their lines of nearly horizon- 
tal strata, that they once formed parts of a continuous bed, 
which, ere the operation of the denuding agencies, had 
overlaid, to the depth of from two to three thousand feet, 
the gneiss and quartz deposits below. They now exist, 
however, as a group of magnificent pyramids, compared 
with Avhich those of Egypt are but the toy erections of 
children ; and yet, from the rectilinear character of their 
abrupt and mural precipices, coursed as if with tears of 
ashlar, — from their general regularity of form, their utter 
bareness of vegetation, and their rich, warm color, which 
contrasts as strongly with the cold gray tints of the rocky 
platform on which they rest, as the warm color of our 
fresher public buildings with the cold gray of our paved 
streets or squares, — they seem rather works of human 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 269 

contrivance than productions of Nature. Seen from the 
west in a clear summer evening, when the red level light 
falls on the still redder stone, but at a sufficient distance 
to admit of those softening influences of the atmosphere 
which mellow the harsher reds into crimson and purple, 
there is a gorgeous beauty in these pieces of Nature's 
masonry which it is scarce possible to exaggerate in de- 
scription. Beneath and in front we see a tumbling sea of 
craggy hills, which even the warm gleam of sunset scarce 
relieves from their sober tint of neutral gray; while rising 
over them abrupt and bold, and lined with their horizontal 
bars, appear the noble pyramids in their rich vestures of 
regal purple, — the monuments of an antiquity compared 
with which that of Nineveh and Babylon belong to the 
morning hours of a day not yet come to its close. 1 

But it is peculiarly in the southern Silurian portions of 
the kingdom that "scarce a mountain lifts its head un- 
sung." Yarrow, Ettrick, St. Mary's Loch, Leader Haughs, 
Tweedside, — - especially along those upper reaches of the 
river where it mirrors, in its calmer pools, the classic ruins 
of Melrose and Dryburg, and the young woods of Abbots- 
ford, — the Galawater, Teviotdale, Lammermuir, Galloway, 
and Nithsdale, the springs of the Doon, the hills that 
rise over the source of Dee, and the "moors and mosses 
many" where the "Stinchar flows," — are all to be sought 
and found in the Silurian region of Scotland. It will 
scarce do now to estimate the scenic merit associated with 
these names at its actual value. The words of sober truth 

1 The above description of the scenery of the West Highlands is, in 
fact, that of the Silurian, although written before Sir Roderick Murchison 
discovered his error in laying down these mountains as Old Red. It is 
inserted here to fill up the hiatus in description which would else occur. 
— L. M. 

23* 



270 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

would seem, according to Wordsworth, " strange words of 
slight and scorn," — 

" What 's Yarrow but a river bare, 
That glides the dark hills under? 
There are a thousand such elsewhere, 
As worthy of our wonder." 

Even the indomitable good nature of Sir Walter was 
scarce proof against what he deemed the disparaging, but, 
I doubt not, truthful, estimate of Washington Irving. 
"Our ramble," says this accomplished writer, in his "Ab- 
botsford," "took us on the hills, commanding an extensive 
prospect. * Now,' said Scott, ' I have brought you, like the 
pilgrim in the "Pilgrim's Progress," to the top of the 
Delectable Mountains, that I may show you all the goodly 
regions hereabouts. Yonder is Lammermuir and Smal- 
holme; and there you have Galashiels, and Torwoodlee, 
and Galawater; and in that direction you see Teviotdale 
and the braes of Yarrow, and Ettrick stream winding 
along, like a silver thread, to throw itself into the Tweed.' 
He went on thus to call over names celebrated in Scottish 
song, and most of which had recently received a romantic 
interest from his own pen. In fact, I saw a great part of 
the border country spread out before me, and could trace 
the scenes of those poems and romances which had in a 
manner bewitched the world. I gazed about me for a time 
with mute surprise, I may almost say with disappointment. 
I beheld a mere succession of gray, waving hills, line be- 
yond line, as far as my eye could reach, monotonous in 
their aspect, and so destitute of trees, that one could almost 
see a stout fly walking along their profile ; and the far- 
famed Tweed appeared a naked stream, flowing between 
bare hills, without a tree or thicket on its banks. I could 
not help giving utterance to my thoughts. Scott hummed 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 271 

for a moment to himself, and looked grave. He had no 
idea of having his muse complimented at the expense of 
his native hills. * It may be partiality,' said he, at length ; 
4 but to my eye these gray hills, and all this wild border 
country, have beauties peculiar to themselves. I like the 
very nakedness of the land : it has something bold, and 
stern, and solitary about it.' " Yes ; there is no question 
that, had not the poets thought so, they could not have 
sung so honestly and warmly, and, of consequence, so 
successfully : 

" The poet's lyre, to fix his theme, 
Must he the poet's heart;" 

and so let us with a good grace acquiesce in their decision. 
The border land, with its Silurian groundwork, has its 
peculiar beauties ; and no one could portray them at once 
so graphically and so discriminatingly as Scott himself. 
Take, for instance, the passage in "Guy Mannering," where 
he describes his hero, Brown, and the redoubtable Dandy 
Dinmont, approaching Charlieshope after the rencontre 
with the gipsies on Bewcastle Moor. " Night was now 
falling, when they came in sight of a pretty river, winding 
its way through a pastoral country. The hills were greener 
and more abrupt than those which Brown had lately passed, 
sinking their grassy sides at once upon the stream. They 
had no pretensions to magnificence of height, or to roman- 
tic shapes, nor did their smooth swelling slopes exhibit 
either rocks or woods; yet the view was wild, solitary, 
and pleasingly rural. No inclosures, no roads, almost no 
tillage : it seemed a land where a patriarch would have 
chosen to feed his flocks and herds." This is faithful de- 
scription, at once beautiful and characteristic ; and such of 
my audience as remember the exquisite landscape of the 



272 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

"Enterkin" of our countryman Harvey, as exhibited at the 
Royal Institution here, in — if I remember aright — the 
year 1846, with its gray rocks, its green swelling hills of 
softish outline, and its recluse and houseless valley of deep- 
est loneliness, will be convinced, as I am, that where there 
is in the mind a certain prominent requisite present, the 
region of the Silurians is as available for the purposes of 
the painter as for those of the poet, — that one requisite 
being the not very definable and many-sided faculty repre- 
sented by the single magic word genius. 

The Silurians of Scotland, though of very considerable 
depth, are greatly less rich in organic remains than the 
contemporary deposits of England and the Continent. 
Yast beds of gray slaty rock, hundreds of feet in thickness, 
seem to have been formed at the bottom of profound seas 
beyond the zero line of animal or vegetable life. And even 
in the cases in which organisms of both kingdoms were 
present, we find their remains very imperfectly preserved. 1 
The flora of the system in Scotland is represented merely 
by a few dark-colored carbonaceous beds, which occasion- 
ally pass into an impure anthracite or blind coal, and which 
are probably identical in their origin with the anthracite 
schists of Scandinavia, regarded by Sir Roderick Murchi- 
son as the remains of large forests of algae and fuci, which 
originally existed in the Silurian seas, and which, from 
their perishable nature, have lost all trace of their original 
forms. In the ashes of an anthracite of our Scottish Silu- 



1 As mentioned in the preface, it is stated by Sir Roderick Murchison, in 
his Leeds address to the British Association, that twenty species of Silu- 
rian fossils have been discovered by Mr. Peach in a limestone band above 
the Silurian conglomerate of the Western Highlands, determined by Mr. 
Salter, and carefully examined by Sir Roderick himself. They are Maclu- 
rea, Murchisonia, Cephileta, and Orthoceras, with an Orthis, etc. — L. M. 



LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 273 

rians, which occurs near Traquair, Professor Nicol, of 
Cork, observed, under the microscope, tubular fibres un- 
questionably vegetable, but which he thought indicative of 
vegetation of a higher class than our existing algae. There 
is, however, a family of marine plants now represented on 
our coasts by a single species, which had, I am inclined to 
think, its representatives at a very early period in our seas ; 
and which, had it existed during the Silurian ages, could 
have furnished the tubular cells. I refer to the Zostera, or 
grass-wrack, a plant of the pond-weed family, which, unlike 
any of the algae, has true roots, true flowers,' true seeds, 
tough fibrous stems, and grass-like leaves, traversed by 
parallel veins, and that yet lives in the sea among lamina- 
rice and floridiw, far below the fall of our lowest stream- 
tides. It is worthy of notice, too, that the Zostera marina, 
our recent British species, when driven ashore on parts of 
our coasts at certain seasons, — as it always is, in great 
abundance, — decomposes into a substance much resem- 
bling peat, that, unlike the brown pulpy mass into which 
the algae in similar circumstances resolve, retains distinct 
trace of the vegetable fibre. It is further noticeable, that 
some of the vegetable remains of the Old Red Sandstone 
— the oldest specimens furnished by our Scottish flora that 
present aught approaching distinctness of outline — exhibit 
several traits that remind us of the leaves of gigantic 
Zostera. The vegetable impressions of some of the Caith- 
ness flagstones have rectilinear edges, and are traversed by 
parallel lines, scarce less strongly marked than the ridges 
of the Calamite ; but, from the extreme thinness of the 
impression left in the rock, they seem rather the veins of 
leaves than the fluted markings of stems. It is quite pos- 
sible, therefore, that though the anthracite beds of our 
Scottish Silurian system give evidence of the existence of 



274 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

a higher vegetation than that of the algae, it may have 
been a marine vegetation notwithstanding. No terrestrial 
plant has yet been detected in the Silurians of either Eng- 
land oj? Scotland : the flora of the time, within at least the 
area of the British islands, seems to have been a poverty- 
stricken flora of the sea, consisting mainly of Fuci and 
Algae, and including as its highest forms a species or two 
of Zostera, or, as is more probable, of some extinct analo- 
gous family. 

The Silurian fauna in Scotland consisted also, so far 
as we can now judge from the broken remains, of but a 
few marine forms. In the Silurian deposits of England 
fishes appear; but in our Scotch Silurians we find nothing 
higher than a Trilobite or a cephalopoclous mollusc. 
The Trilobite was perhaps the most characteristic organic 
form of the system. It occurred, also, though in types 
specifically distinct, in the Old Red Sandstones of England 
and the Continent; and I have found well-marked spec- 
imens even in the Mountain Limestone of this neigh- 
borhood, — the formation in which the family finally dis- 
appears ; but it was in the Silurian system that it received 
its fullest development, both in size and number; and 
portions of at least five species have been detected in 
the Silurian deposits of Scotland. The Trilobite was a 
many-jointed crustacean, which since the close of the Car- 
boniferous period, has had no adequate representative in 
creation, but whose nearest allies we have now to seek 
among the minute Entomostraca, especially among the 
genus Branchipus, — little insect-like creatures, occasion- 
ally found in stagnant pools, furnished with fin-like legs, 
fitted for swimming, but not for walking with, and that, 
spending happy lives, darting hither and thither through 
the upper reaches of the water, now swim along the sur- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 275 

face on their backs, and now on their abdomens. The 
Trilobites, like the Entomostraca, seem to have been 
furnished with merely membranaceous, oar-like limbs, and 
must have led a purely aquatic life as swimmers, — at one 
time oaring their way, back below, along the surface of 
the sea, at another, back above, along the bottom. But 
some of these Entomostraca of the Old Silurian ocean 
were, compared with their modern representatives, of 
great size. The Homalonotus delphinocephalus had a car- 
apace as large as that of an ordinary market crab, and the 
Asaphus tyrannus and Isotelus megistos were each of 
them as large animals, though different in their propor- 
tions, as ordinary market-lobsters. But it seems to have 
been characteristic of both the flora and fauna of these an- 
cient times, that many of their characteristic forms should 
unite great size to a humility of organization restricted 
in the present ages to forms comparatively minute. The 
Trilobites of the Silurian system, like the Club-mosses and 
EquisetaceaB of The Coal Measures, were of a Brogclig- 
nagian cast ; and, regarded as Entomostraca, we must hold 

— to return to a former illustration — that we look upon 
them with eyes sharpened by an experience acquired 
among the productions of Lilliput. So far as we yet 
know, the higher contemporaries of the Trilobite in Scot- 
land were chambered shells of two well-marked genera, 

— that of the Orthoceratite, a long, straight, horn-sha]i>ed 
shell ; and that of the Lituite, which may be described 
as an Orthoceratite curled up into a scroll. And, asso- 
ciated with these, we find some of the low brachio- 
podous molluscs of the more ancient types, such as Lep- 
tense, Orthes, and Spirifers. But by far the most char- 
acteristic organisms of our Scottish Silurians belonged 
to a low zoophitic family, allied by some of their aflin- 



276 LECTURES Otf GEOLOGY. 

ities, in some of their genera, to the sea-pens, and by cer- 
tain other affinities, in some of their other genera, to the 
Sertularia. They are known to the geologist by the gene- 
ral name of Graptolites. The Sertularia, compound, plant- 
like animals, that resemble miniature bushes in spring, 
just as the buds are bursting into leaf, are attached al- 
ways, by their seeming roots, to rocks, shells, or sea- 
weed, and so require a hard bottom; whereas the sea- 
pens, compound, feather-like Zoophites, whose every fibre 
contains its rows of living creatures, affect soft muddy 
bottoms, in which they may be found sticking by their 
quill-like points, like arrows in the soft sward around a 
target. I have seen them brought up by scores on the 
lines of the fisherman, out of a muddy ravine in the Mo- 
ray Frith, that sinks abruptly from beside the edge of a 
hard submarine bank, to the depth of thirty fathoms ; and 
have often admired their graceful, quill-like forms, and 
their delicate hues, that range from pink to crimson, and 
from crimson to purple. And, judging from the character 
of those gray carbonaceous deposits in wiiich the Grap- 
tolites of our Silurian rocks most abound, it is probable 
that they also were mud-loving animals, and more resem- 
bled in their habitats, if not in their structure, the sea- 
pens than the Sertularia. It is a curious circumstance 
that, in the group at least, the Graptolites of Scotland are 
more obviously allied to the Graptolites of the vast Silu- 
rian deposits of Canada and the United States, than to 
those of the Silurians of England. With this curious 
zoophite we take farewell, in Scotland, of life and organ- 
ization, and the record of the palaeontologist closes. The 
remains of no plant or of no animal have been detected in 
this country underlying the rocks in which the oldest 
Graptolites occur. 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 277 

Beneath the Silurian deposits of Scotland there rest, 
to an enormous thickness, what, with the elder geologists, 
I shall persist in terming the primary deposits, consisting, 
in the descending order, of clay-slates, mica-schists, quartz- 
rocks, primary limestones, and the two varieties of gneiss, 
— the granitic and the schistose. 1 In retaining the old 
name, I must, however, be regarded as merely holding that 
these rocks were actually the first-formed rocks of what 
is noio Scotland, — that the gneiss was gneiss, and the 
slate was slate, ere ever our oldest fossiliferous formations 
began to be deposited, or the organisms which they contain 
had lived or died. Into the question raised regarding the 
form in which they were deposited, or the condition of 
our planet during the period of their deposition, I do not 
at present enter. On the other point, however, — the com- 
parative antiquity of these unfossiliferous rocks in Scot- 
land, — the evidence seems very conclusive ; the base of 
some of the oldest deposits in which we find organisms 
inclosed consists of 'broken, and in most cases water- 
rolled, fragments of the gneisses, quartz-rocks, clay-slates, 
and mica-schists of the primary regions of the country. 2 
These primary regions are of great extent. The gneiss 
region contains nearly ten thousand square miles of sur- 
face ; the mica-schist, fully three thousand ; and the quartz- 
rock and clay-slate united, about fourteen hundred miles 
more. Comprising almost all the Highlands of Scotland, 
with the greater part of two of our Lowland counties, 
Banffshire and Aberdeen, their entire area, if we add about 
fifteen hundred miles additional of granite and primary 

1 Hugh Miller evidently more than suspected the history of the 
geology of the north and northwest of Scotland, as developed by Mr. 
Peach and Sir Roderick Murchison in 1858. — W. S. S. 

2 See Murchison's " Siluria," 2d edition, App. 553, 554, and 556. 

24 



278 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

porphyry, does not fall short of sixteen thousand square 
miles. It would be a bold and perilous task for one who 
has in some degree appreciated those sublimely impres- 
sive word-paintings of the Highlands which have added so 
largely to the well-earned celebrity of your distinguished 
President, and which seem invested with the very atmos- 
phere of our hills, or who has seen with admiration and 
delight not only the very features, but all the poetry, 
of our noble mountain scenery, glowing from the canvas 
of Macculloch and of Hill, — it would, I say, be a perilous 
task under the recollection of achievements such as theirs, 
to attempt a dull analysis of the geologic principles on 
which the peculiarities of our Highland landscape depend. 
I would feel as if I were bringing you from the studio 
of some heaven-taught sculptor, crowded with shapes of 
manly beauty and feminine loveliness, to lecture, amid the 
melancholy rubbish of a dissecting room, on the articula- 
tions and proportions of the bones, and the form and 
j)osition of the muscles. I shall venture, therefore, on 
merely a few desultory remarks, and shall request you, in 
order to lighten them as much as possible, to accompany 
me, first, in a sort of mesmeric expedition to the western 
extremity of Glencoe ; at which, after having journeyed 
as only the clairvoyant can journey, let us now deem our- 
selves all safely arrived, and just set out on our way back 
again by the Loch Lomond road. In the course of our 
journey we shall pass, in the ascending order, over all the 
great Primary formations. 1 

1 According to a diagram which I have had the honor of receiving from 
the hand of Sir Roderick Murchison, illustrating his latest explorations in 
the north, there are two distinct gneisses, — an older and aj-ounger; the 
first underlying the Cambrian conglomerate and Silurian fossil-bearing 
band of the west; the other or younger gneiss forming part of the central 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 279 

Let us first mark the character of the Glen, — not less 
famous for the severe and terrible sublimity of its natural 
features, than for that dark incident in its history which 
associates in such melancholy harmony with the terrible 
and the severe. We are in a region of primary porphyry, 
— in the main a dark-colored rock, though it is one of its 
peculiar traits, that in the course of a few yards it some- 
times changes its hue from dark green to black or a deep 
neutral tint, and from these again to chocolate color, to 
brick red, or to iron gray. But the prevailing hues are 
dingy and sombre; and hence, independently of the brown 
heath and ling, and those* deep shadows which always 
accompany steep rocks and narrow ravines, a sombre tone 
in the coloring of the landscape. When, however, for a 
few days the atmosphere has been dry and the sky serene, 
the dark rocks seem in many parts as if strewed over with 
an exceedingly slight covering of new-fallen snow, — the 
effect of the weathering of a thin film of the compact feld- 
spar, which forms the basis of the porphyry into a white 
porcelanic earth. It is, however, in the form of the rocks 
that we detect the more striking peculiarities of the por- 
phyritic formation. They betray their igneous origin in 
their semi-columnar structure. Every precipice is scarred 
vertically by the thick-set lines which define the thin irreg- 
ular columns into which the whole is divided; and as the 
columnar arrangement is favorable to the production of 
tall steep precipices, deep narrow corries, and jagged and 
peaked summits, the precipices on either side are tall and 
steep, the corries are deep and narrow, and the. summits 

nucleus, and underlying the Old Red Sandstone conglomerates and ascend- 
ing fossiliferous series of the east. Of course, the Cambrian will contain 
fragments of the older, and the Old Red conglomerate fragments of the 
younger gneiss. — L. M. 



280 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

are sharp, spine-like and uneven. A hill of primary por- 
phyry, where not too much pressed upon by its neighbor 
hills, as trees press upon one another in a thick wood, so 
that each checks the development of each, generally affects 
a pyramidal form ; and we find fine specimens of the reg- 
ularly pyramidal hill in the upper part of the valley, just 
as we enter on the open moor. I may mention, ere we 
quit Glencoe, that the more savagely sublime scenery of 
Scotland is almost all porphyritic. There is only one 
other rock — hypersthene — which at all equals the pri- 
mary porphyry in this respect ; and hypersthene is of com- 
paratively rare occurrence in Scotland. It furnishes, how- 
ever, one very noble scene in the Isle of Skye : the stern 
and solitary valley of Corriskin, so powerfully described in 
the "Lord of the Isles," is a hypersthene valley. 

Emerging from Glencoe, we enter upon a scene that, 
in simple outline, abstracted from the dingy tone of the 
coloring, and the bleak and scanty vegetation common to 
both, contrasts with it more strongly than perhaps any 
other in Scotland. We have quitted the porphyritic re- 
gion, and entered upon a region of granite and gneiss. 
Looking back from that most solitary of Scottish inns, 
King's House, we find that we can determine with much 
exactness, from the form of the hills, where the porphyry 
ends and the granite or gneiss begins. The last of the 
porphyritic hills is a noble pyramid, broken into dizzy prec- 
ipices, and lined vertically, like some of our semi-columnar 
traps ; whereas the first of the granitic hills, placed imme- 
diately beside it, with but a narrow valley between, is of 
rounded outline, — a mere hummock magnified into a 
mountain, and wrapped round by a continuous cawl of 
brown heath. On the other hand, we see the granite rol- 
ling out into a moory plain, — one of the dreariest in Scot- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 281 

land, — and forming a basin for a long, flat-shored loch, 
whose brown waters do not reflect a single human dwel- 
ling. Granite, however, does not always present features 
so little attractive. It is, in truth, a many-charactered 
rock. In general, the feldspar, which enters so largely into 
its composition, contains a considerable per centage of 
potash, and so decomposes readily ; and hence the rounded 
forms of many of our granite hills and boulders. It affects, 
too, on the large scale, though unstratmed, a tabular ar- 
rangement, and sometimes exists, as in this instance, and 
in those dreary parts of the lowlands of Aberdeen where 
the patrimony of the redoubtable Sir Dugald Dalgetty lay, 
as extensive and usually very barren plains. But in other 
parts it has little or no potash in its composition ; and 
forming, in these circumstances, one of the most durable 
of rocks, its peaks and precipices stand up, as in Goatfell 
in Arran, with all the porphyritic sharpness of outline, 
unweathered for ages, or present, as in Ben Macdui and 
its Titanic compeers, features at once bold, broad, and sub- 
limely impressive. Humboldt, generally so correct in his 
" Views of Nature," seems to have seized on the granite in 
but one of its aspects. " All formations," we find him say- 
ing, "are common to every quarter of the globe, and as- 
sume the like forms. Everywhere basalt rises in twin 
mountains and truncated cones; everywhere trap porphyry 
presents itself to the eye under the form of grotesquely- 
shaped masses of rock ; while granite terminates in gently 
rounded summits." 

We pursue our journey, and enter on a great gneiss dis- 
trict. And in its swelling hills, rolled, like pieces of plain 
drapery, into but a few folds, and in its long withdrawing 
valleys, more imposing from an element of simple extent 
than from aught peculiarly striking in their contour, we 

24* 



282 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

recognize the staple scenery of the Scotch Highlands, — ; 
the scenery of ten thousand square miles. A gneiss hill 
is usually massive, rounded, broad of base, and withal some- 
what squat, as if it were a mountain well begun, but in- 
terdicted somehow in the building, rather than a finished 
mountain. It seems almost always to lack the upper stories 
and the pinnacles. It is, if I may so express myself, a hill 
of one heave; whereas all our more imposing Scottish hills, 
— such as Ben Nevis and Ben Lomond, — are hills of at 
least two heaves; and hence, in journeying through a 
gneiss district, there is a frequent feeling on the part of 
the traveller that the scenery is incomplete, but that a few 
hills, judiciously set down upon the tops of the other hills, 
would give it the proper finish. No hill, however, accom- 
plishes more with a single heave than a gneiss one ; the 
broad-based Ben Wyvis, that raises its head, white with 
other snows than those of age, more than three thousand 
feet over the sea, and looks down on all the other moun- 
tains of Ross-shire, is a characteristic gneiss hill of a single 
heave. Quitting the gneiss region, we cross a compara- 
tively narrow strip of quartz rock. The quartz hills in its 
course are, however, not very characteristic. Such of you 
as may have sailed over the upper reaches of Loch Maree, 
with its precipitous, weather-bleached pyramidal hills, so 
bare of vegetation atop that their peaks may be seen 
gleaming white in the autumnal moonlight for miles, as if 
covered with snow, or who may have threaded your way 
through the deep and sterile valleys that open their long 
vistas towards the head of the lake, will be better able to 
conceive, than from aught witnessed in the course of our 
present day's journey, of the savage wildness of scenery — 
savage and wild, but grand withal — which is the proper 
characteristic of a quartz-rock district. 



LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 283 

And now, the strip of quartz rock passed over, we enter 
into an extensive region of mica-schist, — a formation so 
favorable to the development of a picturesque beauty, — 
ever and anon rising into the sublime, — that what is pecu- 
liarly the classic ground of Highland scenery is to be found 
within its precincts. Loch Awe, Loch Long, Loch Goil, 
Loch Tay, by much the larger and finer part of Loch Lo- 
mond, all Loch Katrine, Ben Venue, Ben Lecli, Ben Lo- 
mond, and the Trossachs, with many a fine lake and 
stream besides, and many a noble hill, are included in this 
rich province of the mica-schist. 

We first become aware that we are nearing the forma- 
tion by the peculiar contour of its hills, as seen at a dis- 
tance of several miles. As we approach their gray rocks 
of silky lustre, we find that they are curved, wrinkled, 
contorted, so as to remind us of pieces of ill-laid-by satin, 
that bear on their crashed surfaces the creases and crump- 
lings of a thousand careless foldings ; and mark farther, 
that it is to these curves and contortions of the strata 
that the tubercled outlines of the hills are owing, and, 
with these, the bold projecting knobs and sudden recesses 
which break up their surfaces into so many picturesque 
wildernesses of light and shade. Not unfrequently, how- 
ever, vast masses of schist, of a structure as dense and 
solid as that of granite, occur in the micaceous districts ; 
and these form hills of a simpler outline, which, like the 
rock which composes them, seem intermediate in character 
between the mica-schist and the gneiss hills. All the 
mica-schists, however, decompose into soils, which, though 
light and thin, are more favorable to the production of the 
grasses and the common dicotyledonous shrubs and trees 
of the Highlands, than any of the gneisses or granites, and 
greatly more so than the porphyries or quartz-rocks ; and 



284 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

so the micaceous regions are not only more picturesque in 
outline than any of the others, but also richer in foliage 
and softer in color. A tangled profusion of vegetation 
forms quite as marked a feature in the living and breath- 
ing description of the " Lady of the Lake," as the mural 
picturesqueness of the crags and precipices which the 
vegetation half conceals ; and this, be it remembered, is 
not an ordinary characteristic of the Scottish Highlands, 
though true to nature in the mica-schist region selected 
by Scott as the scene of his story. After employing, in 
describing the rocks near Loch Katrine, well nigh half the 
vocabulary of the architect, — spires, pyramids and pinna- 
cles, — towers, turrets, domes, and battlements, — cupolas, 
minarets, pagodas, and mosques, — he goes on to say, 

" Nor were these earth-born castles bare, 
Nor lacked they many a banner fair; 
For from their shivered brows displayed, 
Far o'er the unfathomable glade, 
All twinkling with the dewdrop's sheen, 
The brier-rose fell in streamers green, 
And creeping shrubs of thousand dyes 
Waved in the west wood's summer sighs. 
Boon nature scattered free and wild 
Each plant or flower, the mountain's child. 
Here eglantine embalmed the air, 
Hawthorn and hazle mingled there, 
The primrose pale and violet flower 
Found in each cliff a narrow bower; 
Foxglove and nightshade, side by side, 
Emblems of punishment and pride, 
Grouped their dark hues with every stain 
The weather-beaten crags retain, 
With boughs that quaked with every breath; 
Gray birch and aspen wept beneath; 
Aloft the ash and warrior oak 
Cast anchor in the rifted rock; 
And higher yet the pine-tree hung 
His shattered trunk, and frequent flung, 



LECTURES OX GEOLOGY. 285 

"Where seemed the cliffs to meet on high, 
His boughs athwart the narrow sky." 

Here is there a description of the characteristic vegetation 
of our richer mica-schist valleys, not more remarkable lor 
its poetic luxuriance than for its strict truth, — truth so 
strict and literal, that I question whether even the hyper- 
critic, who looked for but a typical catalogue, could enu- 
merate more than two forms of vegetation, prevalent in 
such districts, which it does not include. The ferns grow 
at once singularly rank and delicate in the shade, amid 
the bosky recesses of the mica-schist ; and every damper 
recess of the rock we find thickly tapestried over by the 
mosses and the liverworts. 

Passing southwards along the dark surface of Loch 
Lomond, skirted for rather more than two-thirds of its 
length by these hills of mica-schist, which confer on its 
upper reaches a character of mingled picturesqueness and 
sublimity, we enter, nearly opposite the pastoral village of 
Luss, on a band of clay-slate, — the last or most modern 
of the primary formations. It is of no great breadth, — 
some three or four miles at most ; but it runs diagonally 
across the entire kingdom, from the western shores of 
Bute, where it disappears under the outer waters of the 
Frith of Clyde, to near Stonehaven, where we lose it in 
the German Ocean. We find it associated with a softer 
style of scenery than the mica-schist. Lacking the mul- 
titudinous contortions, and consequent knobs and pro- 
tuberances, of the schist, it is less picturesque, though 
scarce less beautiful; nor is its beauty devoid of an en- 
nobling mixture of the sublime. The gracefully-contoured 
hills that rise immediately behind Luss, with their recluse 
withdrawing valley, — the green rolling meadow on which 
the village is built, — and in front the bolder and finer 



286 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

islands of the lake, — belong all to the clay-slate, and com- 
pose a very characteristic landscape. Dunkeld, Comrie, 
and the fine country to the north and west of Callendar, 
including Loch Vennacher, with many a scene besides, of 
a character intermediate, as becomes their place, between 
the Highlands and the Lowlands, occur in the belt of clay- 
slate that sweeps in its diagonal course from sea to sea. 
Leaving Luss behind us, we enter, ere quitting the lakes, 
on what is unmistakably the low country. The frame- 
work of the land before us and on either hand, with that 
of about one-half the lower islands of Loch Lomond, is 
all formed of the Old Red Sandstone ; and what Byron 
would perhaps term the "domestic beauties" of the pros- 
pect, — swelling hills ploughed to the top, green lanes, 
rich meadows, and woods whose rectilinear edges still tell 
of the planter's line, — bear evidence to the fact. The 
land, however, is that of Buchanan and of Smollett. Both 
were born on the Old Red Sandstone here; and the latter, 
in his well-known description of the lake, in " Humphrey 
Clinker," — the product of a time when descriptions of 
Scottish scenery were less common than they are now, — 
places in the foreground, in a style unmistakable from 
their truth, the features of this Lowland formation, which, 
in his age, was unfurnished with a name. " I have seen," 
he says, "the Lago di Garcia, Albano, De Yico, Bolsina, 
and Geneva, and, upon my honor, prefer Loch Lomond to 
them all, — a preference which is certainly owing to the 
verdant islands that seem to float upon its surface, afford- 
ing the most enchanting objects of repose to the excursive 
view. Nor are the banks destitute of beauties wiiich 
even partake of the sublime. On this side they display a 
variety of woodland, corn-fields, and pasture, with several 
agreeable villas emerging, as it were, out of the lake, till, 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 287 

at some distance, the prospect terminates in huge moun- 
tains covered with heath. Everything here is romantic 
beyond imagination : the country is justly termed the 
Arcadia of Scotland." In the corn-fields here, the wood- 
lands, and the pastures, we recognize the Lowland features 
of the Old Red placed prominently in the foreground; 
and in the huge mountains in the distance, the bolder 
Highland features of the clay-slate and the mica-schist. 
In still journeying southwards, we skirt the banks of the 
Leven, — the stream which connects the waters of the 
lake with those of the Clyde, and which, for the greater 
part of its course, runs over an Old Red Sandstone of the 
same age as that of Balruddery, Carmylie, and Turin, and 
which presents as its characteristic organism, the Cepha- 
laspis. And nowhere in Scotland, as is well shown in 
Smollett's classical Ode, is there a more thoroughly Low- 
land river. 

" Pure stream, in whose transparent wave 
My youthful limbs I wont to lave ; 
No torrents stain thy limpid source, 
No rocks impede thy dimpling course, 
That sweetly warbles o'er its bed, 
With white, round, polished pebbles spread. 
Devolving from thy parent lake, 
A charming maze thy waters make, 
By bowers of birch and groves of pine, 
And hedges flowered with eglantine." 

Ere, however, closing our journey of a day, which intro- 
duces us to so interesting an epitome of the scenery of 
the primary rocks and the Scottish Highlands, we are 
startled in the midst of the low country by scenery which 
seems to be that of the Highlands repeated, but on a 
smaller scale, and, if I may so express myself, in a more 
mannered style. We pass over a narrow belt of the trap. 



288 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

rocks, which, like the stratified deposits of this part of the 
kingdom, — clay-slate and Old Red Sandstone, — runs 
from sea to sea, and which, including in its range the 
Campsie and the Ochil hills, is here represented by the 
picturesque double-peaked rock which bears the ancient 
fortalice of Dumbarton, — the castle which, according to 
Jeanie Deans's friend, Mr. Archibald, was always given in 
keeping to the best man in Scotland, — at one time to 
Sir William Wallace, at another to the Duke of Argyle. 

The depth of the primary stratified rocks, which in 
Scotland must be very great, has been variously estimated 
by geologists, as low as five and as high as ten miles, — 
evidence enough, did we require any such, that there must 
be some degree of obscurity in the data on which the 
calculations regarding it have been founded. It is always 
extremely difficult to estimate the thickness of even a 
clay-slate or quartz-rock deposit in a mountainous coun- 
try, where the centres of disturbance are numerous and 
involved ; and in gneiss and mica-schist — always greatly 
contorted deposits — the difficulty is so enhanced, that 
what begins as calculation usually ends as guess. But 
we at least know that it can be no thin series of deposits, 
however much their strata may be contorted, or however 
often repeated, that covers, in highly inclined positions, 
tracts of country so extended as even those which we find 
covered by them in the Scotch Highlands. In crossing 
the four primary stratified deposits — clay-slate, mica- 
schist, quartz-rock, and gneiss, — at right angles with the 
line in which they traverse the country in the southern 
division of the Highlands, we find them occupying, as 
from near Crieff to Fort-Augustus, a tract rather more 
than sixty miles across; and in crossing at the same angle 
the northern division of the Highlands, — as from Glen 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 289 

Urquliart to the middle reaches of Loch Carron, — we 
find a tract of nearly forty miles occupied by the gneiss 
alone. The question is one on which I would not choose 
to dogmatize ; but an estimate that gave to our Scottish 
primary rocks an aggregate thickness of from six to eight 
miles I would not regard as by any means too high. A 
more vexed question, however, and a still more doubtful 
one, respects their formation. In what form, and under 
what circumstances, it has been often asked, and very 
variously answered, were these stratified primary rocks 
deposited ? 

They exhibit with almost equal prominence two distinct 
classes of phenomena, — an igneous class and an aqueous 
class; and are as intimately associated with the Pleistocene 
rocks by the one, as with the sedimentary rocks by the 
other. I have seen in the same quarry of quartz-rock, 
one set of strata as decidedly chemical in their texture as 
porphyry or hypersthene, and another intermingling set 
as decidedly mechanical as grauwacke* or conglomerate. 
I have seen, too, in the same gneiss rock, the minute 
plates of mica, so abundant in this formation, arranged 
between the layers as decidedly on the sedimentary prin- 
ciple as in a micaceous sandstone, and in the layers them- 
selves as decidedly on the crystalline principle as in 
granite. And this compound character of the gneiss may 
be regarded as the general one, with, of course, certain 
exceptions in all the primary stratified rocks : the condi- 
tion of their stratification is mechanical and sedimentary, 
but the condition of the strata themselves igneous and 
chemical. How were these variously-blended characters 
first induced ? The geologists of one school tell us that 
the primary formations originally existed as ordinary sedi- 
mentary rocks, but that they have since been altered by 

25 



290 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

the action of intense heat, and that, while the stratifica- 
tion remains as an evidence of their first condition, the 
texture of the strata indicates the igneous change which 
has passed over them ; while the geologists of another 
school hold that their first deposition took place under 
circumstances essentially unlike any which now exist, on at 
least the surface of our planet, and that their mineralogical 
conditions were, in consequence, originally different from 
those of any deposition taking place at the present time, 
or in any of the later geological ages. I am inclined to 
hold that there is a wide segment of truth embodied in 
the views of the metamorphists ; but there seems to be 
also a segment of truth on the other side ; and so I must 
likewise hold with their antagonists, that there existed 
long periods in the history of the earth in which there 
obtained conditions of things entirely different from any 
which obtain now, — periods during which life, either 
animal or vegetable, could not have existed on our planet; 
and further, that^he sedimentary rocks of this early age 
may have derived, even in the forming, a constitution and 
texture which, in present circumstances, sedimentary rocks 
cannot receive. 

The scientific world is subject, like the worlds of politics 
and trade, to its periods of action and reaction. Those 
who hold that the earth was once a molten mass through- 
out, — nay, that at a certain, not very profound, depth its 
matter may be still in an incandescent state, — may have 
perhaps driven their theory too far; and the current at 
present seems to have set in against them. Mr. Hopkins's 
profound deductions on the phenomena of Precession and 
Nutation have been held to establish that the crust of the 
earth is at present a solid unyielding mass to the depth of 
at least a thousand miles from the surface. "Nay, there 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 291 

is nothing in this inquiry," says Professor Nichol, in refer- 
ring, in his late admirable work, " The Planetary System," 
to the problem of Mr. Hopkins, — "there is nothing in 
this inquiry rendering it impossible that the globe is solid 
throughout; and assuredly, a distinct negative is given 
to a whole class of prevalent geological conceptions, on 
grounds vastly more solid than any which appear to sus- 
tain them." And I find Sir Charles Lyell, in the latest 
edition of his "Principles," — that of last year, — suggest- 
ing the existence of a circle of superficial action on the 
earth's crust, quite sufficient to account for an intermittent 
igneous activity altogether independent of central heat, 
and which might go on by fits and starts forever, and be 
as powerful a million of years hence as in those incal- 
culably ancient times when our Scottish gneiss was in the 
forming. Accepting the theory of Sir Humphrey Davy, 
of an unoxidized metallic nucleus of the globe, capable of 
being oxidized all around its porphyry by the percolation 
of water, and of evolving heat enough in the process to 
melt the surrounding rocks, he thus provides plutonic, 
metamorphic, volcanic agencies; and whereas Sir Hum- 
phrey Davy held, that when a thick crust of oxide had 
once formed in this way, it served to shut out the water, 
and the chemical action became in consequence more and 
more languid, till it altogether ceased, Sir Charles finds, 
in another but harmonizing theory, an expedient for re'in- 
vigorating the slumbering plutonic forces, and thus, after 
a period of repose, renewing their activity. The oxygen 
of the water is, of course, the oxidizing agent ; but water 
also contains hydrogen, and hydrogen is a deoxidizing 
agent. "When the, oxidizing process was going on," 
says Sir Charles, " much hydrogen would of necessity 
be evolved : it would permeate the crust of the earth, and 



292 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

be stored up for ages in fissures and caverns ; and when- 
ever* it happened to come in contact with the metallic 
oxides at a high temperature, the reduction of these oxides 
would be the necessary result." And we have thus a 
circle of forces, — oxidization of the metallic basis to 
evolve the plutonic agencies, and debxidization of the 
oxides to produce the metallic basis again. The process 
would somewhat resemble that on which the movement 
of the steam-engine depends, and in which water is first 
expanded into steam, and then the steam in turn con- 
densed into water, and thus the action of the engine 
kept up. 

Now, I need not here say how thoroughly I respect the 
judgment and admire the genius of Sir Charles Lyell, — 
one of the greatest of geologists, and a man of whom Scot- 
land may well be proud ; nor need I say how much of 
pleasure and instruction I owe to the rich and eloquent 
writings of Professor Nichol. But, like Job's younger 
friend, I too must take the liberty of showing forth my 
opinion, and of giving expression to a conviction, on 
grounds of which my audience must judge, that both Sir 
Charles and the Professor have suffered the reaction wave 
to carry them too far. 

Mr. Charles M'Laren, in a popular digest of Mr. Hop- 
kins's deductions, which first appeared, if I remember 
aright, in the "Scotsman" newspaper, and then in "Jame- 
son's Philosophical Journal," referred, with his character- 
istic caution, to the narrowness of the base on which they 
rested. "Mr. Hopkins's conclusion, no doubt, rests," he 
said, " on a narrow enough basis. It is somewhat like an 
estimate of the distance of the stars deduced from a differ- 
ence of one or two seconds in their apparent position, — 
a difference scarcely distinguishable from errors of obser- 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 293 

vation." Let us, however, waive the doubt irnpiied in this 
remark, however important we may deem it, and grant, 
for the argument's sake, that the base is sufficiently broad 
for the superstructure erected upon it. Let us freely grant, 
after first availing ourselves of Mr. M'Laren's protest, and 
placing it on record, that that equatorial ring, thirteen 
miles in thickness, which, by disturbing the balance of the 
earth, is the cause of the phenomena of Precession and 
Nutation, must be attached to a consolidated crust of at 
least a thousand miles in thickness, in order to account for 
the extreme slowness of the peculiar movement which it 
induces. But let us then inquire how it happens that this 
equatorial ring at all exists. If our earth was always the 
stiff, rigid, unyielding mass that it is now, — a huge metal- 
lic ball, bearing, like the rusty ball of a cannon, its crust of 
oxide, — how comes it that its form so entirely belies its 
history ? Its form tells that it also, like the cannon ball, 
was once in a viscid state, and that its diurnal motion on 
its axis, when in this state of viscidity, e T ^gated it, through 
the operation of a well-known law, at the equator, and 
flattened it at the poles, and made it altogether the oblate 
spheroid which all experience demonstrates it to be. It 
may be urged, however, that this form of our planet, which 
seems to speak so unequivocally of law, may, after all, be 
but accident. If so, it must be singular. What say the 
other planets ? Of these, the form of three may be at least 
approximately, and that of one exactly, ascertained. Ve- 
nus, Mars, Saturn, are all, like our earth, oblate spheroids, 
flattened at their poles, and elongated at their equators. 
Their substance must have been spun out by their rotatory 
motion in exactly the line in which, as in the earth, that 
motion is greatest. But while we can only approximately 
determine the values of the equatorial and polar diameters 

25* 



294 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

of these three planets, in one great planet, Jupiter, we can 
ascertain them scarce less exactly than in our own earth ; 
— we can gauge, and measure, and fix the proportions 
which his equatorial ring bears to his general mass. With 
a diameter about eleven times larger than that of our 
planet, and rotating on his axis in less than half the time, 
the motion of the surface at his equator must be more than 
twenty times greater than that of the earth's equatorial 
surface, and his equatorial ring ought, even in proportion 
to his huge bulk, to be more than twenty times as massive. 
And what is the fact ? While the thickness of the equato- 
rial ring of the earth is only equal to about one three-hun- 
dredth part of the earth's diameter, the equatorial ring of 
Jupiter is equal to about the one fourteenth or fifteenth 
part of his diameter. It is, as the integrity of the law 
demands, more than twenty times greater in proportion to 
his mass than the earth's equatorial ring, and absolutely 
more than two thousand times greater. Here, then, is 
demonstration th?* the oblate sphericity of the earth is a 
consequence of the earth's diurnal motion on its axis ; nor 
is it possible that it could have received this form when in 
a solid state. A glass ball made to revolve on a spindle, 
when in a state of viscidity, elongates equatorially, and 
flattens at its poles ; but, if allowed to cool in its original 
form as a sphere, it retains its perfect sphericity without 
change, let us whirl it as rapidly as we may : and no me- 
chanic ever dreams of increasing the disk of a grindstone 
simply by turning it round. The earth, then, when it 
assumed its present form, could not have been a solidified 
mass, like the glass sphere when cooled down, or like the 
grindstone. 

But is it not possible, it may be asked, that the diurnal 
motion may so act on the depositions taking place in the 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 295 

sea, and forming sedimentary rock, or on a region of igne- 
ous action interposed between the oxidized crust of the 
earth and its solid metallic nucleus, and forming plutonic 
or igneous rock — is it not possible that, in the course of 
vastly-extended periods, the earth may have taken its form 
under the influence of the motion exerted on sedimentary 
deposition and plutonic intrusion and upheaval ? Nay, 
what, we ask in reply, are the facts ? Does the diurnal 
motion exercise any influence, even the slightest, on depo- 
sition or plutonic intrusion ? The laws of deposition are 
few, simple, and well known. The denuding and trans- 
porting agencies are floods, tides, waves, icebergs. The 
sea has its currents, the land its rivers ; but while some of 
these flow from the poles towards the equator, others flow 
from the equator towards the poles, uninfluenced by the 
rotatory motion ; and the vast depth and extent of the 
equatorial seas, show that the ratio of deposition is not 
greater in them than in the seas of the temperate regions. 
We have, indeed, in the arctic and antarctic currents, and 
the icebergs which they bear, agents of denudation and 
transport permanent in the present state of things, which 
bring detrital matter from the higher towards the lower 
latitudes ; but they stop far short of the tropics ; they have 
no connection with the rotatory motion ; and their influ- 
ence on the form of the earth must be infinitely slight ; 
nay, even were the case otherwise, instead of tending to 
the formation of an equatorial ring, they would lead to the 
production of two rings widely distinct from the equator. 
And, judging from what appears, we must hold that the 
laws of plutonic intrusion or upheaval, though more ob- 
scure than those of deposition, operate quite as independ- 
ently of the earth's rotatory motion. Were the case other- 
wise, the mountain systems of the world, and all the great 



296 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

continents, would be clustered at the equator; and the. 
great lands and great oceans of our planet, instead of run- 
ning, as they do, in so remarkable a manner, from south to 
north, would range, like the belts of Jupiter, from east to 
west. There is no escape for us from the inevitable con- 
clusion that our globe received its form as an oblate sphe- 
roid at a time when it existed throughout as a viscid mass. 
Nor is it unworthy of remark, that the same arrangement 
through which a fluid earth was moulded into this shape 
under the impulsion of the rotatory motion, also secured 
that when that earth came to be covered by a fluid sea, 
placed under the same impulsive influence, it should cling 
to it equably, like a well-fitted cloak, without falling off to 
the poles on the one hand, or accumulating in a belt round 
the equator at the other. _ 

But time fails, and I cannot follow up this subject to its 
legitimate conclusions. Allow me, therefore, simply to 
state, that I must continue to hold, with Humboldt and 
with Hutton, with Playfair and with Hall, that this solid 
earth was at one time, from the centre to the circumfer- 
ence, a mass of molten matter. Let us remember — I 
employ here the words of Humboldt — that the great 
chemist Sir Humphrey Davy, to whom we are indebted 
for the knowledge of the most combustible metallic sub- 
stances, renounced his bold chemical hypothesis in his last 
work ("Consolations of Travel"), as "inadequate and un- 
tenable;" and further, that, with the oblate sphericity of 
the earth and the planets to be accounted for, those who 
continue to hold what he rejected, will be reduced, if they 
persist, to the unphilosophical necessity of regarding as a 
consequence of miracle, a peculiarity of shape easily ex- 
plainable on the principles of known law. 

Now, the fact of a molten earth involves a long series of 



LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 297 

conditions, each different from all the others, and from the 
conditions of the present time. It involves the existence 
of a period in the history of our planet when life, animal or 
vegetable, was not, and of a succeeding period, when life 
began to be. It involves, too, the ripening of the earth, 
from ages in which its surface was a thin, earthquake-sha- 
ken crust, subject to continual sinkings, and to fiery out- 
bursts of the plutonic matter, to ages in which it is the 
very nature of its noblest inhabitant to calculate on its 
stability as the surest and most certain of all things. It 
involves, in short, those successive conditions of life in the 
geologic ages, which, in connection with what is now Scot- 
land, I have, I am afraid, all too inadequately attempted to 
set before you in my present course. In fine, the primary 
rocks, when they underlie to a great thickness, as in our 
own country, the Palaeozoic deposits, I regard as the de- 
posits of a period in which the earth's crust had sufficiently 
cooled down to permit the existence of a sea, with the 
necessary denuding agencies, — waves and currents, — 
and, in consequence, of deposition also ; but in which the 
internal heat acted so near the surface, that whatever was 
deposited came, as a matter of course, to be metamorphosed 
into semi-plutonic forms, that retained only the stratifica- 
tion. I dare not speak of the scenery of the period. We 
may imagine, however, a dark atmosphere of steam and 
vapor, which for age after age conceals the face of the sun, 
and through which the light of moon or star never pene- 
trates ; oceans of thermal water, heated in a thousand cen- 
tres to the boiling point ; low, half-molten islands, dim 
through the fog, and scarce more fixed than the waves 
themselves, that heave and tremble under the impulsions 
of the igneous agencies ; roaring geysers, that ever and 
anon throw up their intermittent jets of boiling fluid, va- 



298 LECTURES ON GEOLOGY. 

por, and thick steam, from these tremulous lands ; and, in 
the dim outskirts of the scene, the red gleam of fire, shot 
forth from yawning cracks and deep chasms, and that bears 
aloft fragments of molten rock and clouds of ashes. But 
should we continue to linger amid a scene so featureless 
and wild, or venture adown some yawning opening into 
the abyss beneath, where all is fiery and yet dark, — a soli- 
tary hell, without suffering or sin, — we would do well to 
commit ourselves to the guidance of a living poet of true 
faculty, — Thomas Aird, — and see with his eyes, and 
describe in his verse : 

" The awful walls of shadows round might dusky mountains seem, 
But never holy light hath touched an outline with its gleam; 
'T is but the eye's bewildered sense that fain would rest on form, 
And make night's thick blind presence to created shapes conform. 
No stone is moved on mountain here by creeping creature crossed, 
No lonely harper comes to harp upon this fiery coast; 
Here all is solemn idleness; no music here, no jars, 
Where silence guards the coast ere thrill her everlasting bars; 
No sun here shines on wanton isles; but o'er the burning sheet 
A rim of restless halo shakes, which marks the internal heat; 
As in the days of beauteous earth we see, with dazzled sight, 
The red and setting sun o'erflow with rings of welling light." 



NOTE. 

"The only sheila I ever detected in the brick-clay of Scotland occurred in a 
deposit in the neighborhood of St. Andrew's, of apparently the same age as the 
beds at Portobello." — Lecture Second, page 106. 

Note. — Some time after this statement was made, Mr. Miller devoted himself 
to a farther investigation of the brick-clay beds in the neighborhood of Porto- 
bello, and discovered several species of shells in situ, especially great abundance 
of Scrobicularia piperata which he has described in a paper on the brick-clays, to 
be published hereafter. They form a very interesting portion of his Museum, 
now in the University of Edinburgh. " But for him," said an accomplished 
geologist, in talking with me on the subject, " we would have known nothing 
whatever of the brick-clays." — I* M. 



DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES 



A GEOLOGIST'S PORTFOLIO. 



DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES 



ROM A 



GEOLOGIST'S PORTFOLIO. 



GANOID SCALES AND KAYS. 



The scales of the ganoid order consist of three plates, 
— an inner, an outer, and an intervening one. The outer 
is composed mainly of enamel, and retains, when entire, 
however long exposed, much of the original dinginess of 
hue which it bore in the quarry. The inner is a plane of 
porcelanic-looking bone. The intermediate plate is finely 
composed of concentric lines, crossed from the centre to 
the circumference by finely radiating ones ; and when, as 
mostly happens, this middle plate is exposed, the appear- 
ance of a mass of scales through the glass is of great 
beauty. The rays of our soft-finned fish, (Malacopterygii), 
such as the haddock, seem as if cut through at minute dis- 
tances, and then reunited, though less firmly than where 
the bone is entire, with the design, it would seem, of giv- 
ing to the organs of motion which they compose, the nec- 
essary flexibility, somewhat on the principle that a carpen- 
ter cuts half-through with his saw the piece of moulding 
which he intends bending along some rounded corner, or 
forcing into some concave. But in the ancient ganoid 

26 



302 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

fish, in which the rays are bare enamelled bones, and nec- 
essarily of great rigidity, the joints appear real, not ficti- 
tious. We see them cut across into short lengths, a single 
fin consisting of many hundred pieces ; and the problem 
lay in conceiving how such a fin was to be wrought,— 
whether, for instance, each detached length was to have 
its moving ligament ; and if so, how a piece of machinery 
so very complicated and multifarious was to be set and 
kept in motion. Here, however, I found the problem very 
simply resolved. The rays of the ganoid fish, like its 
scales, consist of three plates, — two plates of enamel, one 
on each side, and an interior plate of bone. ~Now the 
joints, — though so well marked, that in rays imbricated 
on the sides, as in those of the Cheirolepis, the imbricated 
markings turn the corners, if one may so speak, just as the 
carvings on a moulding recounter, as a workman would 
say, at the corners of a building, — are not real joints after 
all : they reach but through the inflexible enamel, leaving 
the central plate of bone undivided. Like the rays of the 
Malacopterygii, they are formed on the principle of the 
half-sawn moulding. I observed, too, that the inner plate 
is in every instance considerably narrower than the plates 
of enamel which rest upon it. In the lateral edges of 
every ray which composes the inner portion of the fin 
there must exist a groove, therefore ; and in this groove, 
it is probable, the connecting membrane at one time lay 
hid, performing, like an invisible hinge, its work unseen. 

RECENT BONE-BED IN THE FORMING. 

I once found an interesting illustration of the bone- 
bed, coupled with at least one of the causes to which it 
owes its origin, in the upper part of the Moray Frith. I 



A GEOLOGISTS PORTFOLIO. 303 

had been spending a night at the herring-fishing, on one 
of the most famous fishing-banks of the east coast of Scot- 
land, — the bank of Guilliam. It is a long, flat ridge of 
rock that rises to within ten or twelve fathoms of the sur- 
face. On its southern edge there is a submarine valley 
that sinks to at least twice that depth ; and in the course 
of the night our boat drifted from off the rocky ridge, the 
haunt of the herrings, to the deepest part of the valley, 
where scarce a herring is ever found. Our nets had, how- 
ever, brought fish with them from the fishing-ground, suf- 
ficient in quantity to sink them to the bottom of the hol- 
low ; and in raising them up, — a work of some little 
exertion, — we found them bedaubed with patches of a 
stinking, adhesive mud, that, where partially washed on 
the surface, seemed literally bristling over with minute 
fish-bones. The muddy bottom of the valley may be 
regarded as a sort of submarine burial-ground, — an ex- 
tensive bone-bed in the forming. " What," we asked an 
intelligent old fisherman, "brings the fish here to die? 
Have you observed bones here before ?" " I have observed 
them often," he said: "we catch few herrings here; but 
in winter and spring, when the cold draws the fish from 
off the shallows into deep water, we catch a great many 
haddock and cod in it, and bring up on our lines large 
lumps of the foul bottom. In spring, when most of the 
small fish are sickly and out of season, and too weak to lie 
near the shore, where the water is rough and cold, they 
take shelter in the deep here, in shoals ; and thousands of 
them, as the bones testify, die in the mud, not because 
they come to die in it, but just because their sickly season 
is also their dying season." And such seemed to be the 
true secret of the accumulation. The fish resorted to this 
place of shelter, not in order that they might die, but that 



304 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

they might live ; just as people go to poor-houses and 
hospitals with a similar intention, and yet die in them, at 
times, notwithstanding. And hence, I doubt not, in most 
instances those accumulations of fish-bones which men 
accustomed to the use of the trawl-net find in detached 
spots of bottom, when in other parts, not less frequented 
by fish in the milder seasons, not a single bone is to be 
found, and which have been described as dying places. 
The dying places, — the deep burial-grounds of the sea's 
finny inhabitants, — will be found, almost always, to prove 
their places of shelter. And hence, it is probable, many 
of the bone-beds of the geologist. 



DIPTERUS MACROLEPIDOTUS ABUNDANT IN THE BANNISKIRK 
OLD RED OF CAITHNESS. 



Let the reader imagine a fish delicately carved in ivory, 
and then crusted with a smooth shining enamel, not less 
hard than that which covers the human teeth, but thickly 
dotted with minute puncturings, as if stippled all over 
with the point of a fine needle; — let him imagine the 
enamelled rays lying so thickly in the fins, that no con- 
necting membrane appears, and that each individual ray 
consists of numerous pseudo-joints, so rounded at their 
terminations, that each joint seems a small oblong scale, 
or each ray, rather, a string of oval beads ; — in due har- 
mony with the rounded joints, let him imagine the scales 
of a circular form, and so regularly laid on, that the ruler 
ranges along them in three different ways, — from head to 
tail, parallel to the deeply-marked lateral line, and in slant 
angles across the body ; — immediately under the gill- 
covers, which consist, as in the sturgeon, of but a single 
plate a-piece, let him imagine two strong pectoral fins of 



a geologist's portfolio. 305 

an angular form, with an interior angle in each covered 
with small scales, and the rays, as in the case of the tail, 
forming but a fringe around it ; — let him imagine the ven- 
tral fins, which lie far adown the body, of an exactly simi- 
lar pattern, — angular projections covered with scales in 
the centre, and fringed on two of their edges with rays ; 
- — exactly opposite to these, let there occur an anterior 
dorsal fin of comparatively small size, and then exactly 
opposite to the anal fin a posterior dorsal of at least twice 
the size of the other ; — let the anal fin be also large and 
sweeping, extending for a considerable way under the tail, 
which must like the tails of all the more ancient fish, be 
formed mainly on the under side, the vertebral column 
running on to its termination ; — and the fish so formed 
will be a fair representation of the ancient Dipterus. Pre- 
senting externally in its original state no fragment of 
skin or membrane, and with even its most flexible organs 
sheathed in enamelled bone, it must have very much re- 
sembled a fish carved in ivory. What chiefly struck me 
in the examination was the peculiar structure of the ven- 
tral fins, — the hind paws of the creature, if I may so 
speak. Their internal angle of scales imparts to them an 
appearance of very considerable strength, — such an ap- 
pearance as that presented by the hind fins of the Ichthy- 
osaurus, which, as shown by a lately-discovered specimen, 
were furnished on the outer edges with a fringe of cartila- 
ginous rays ; and I deemed it interesting thus to mark the 
true fish approximating in structure, ere the reptilia yet 
existed, to the reptile type. The young frog, when in its 
transition state, gets its legs fully developed, and yet for 
some little time thereafter retains its tail. The Dipterus 
seems to have been a fish formed on this sort of transition 

plan. 

26* 



306 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

FOSSIL-WOOD OF THE OOLITE AT HELMSDALE, SUTHERLAND. 

What first strikes the observer in the appearance of the 
fossil-wood of this coast is the great distinctness with 
which the annual layers are marked. The harder lines of 
tissue, formed in the end of autumn, stand out as dis- 
tinctly on the weathered surfaces as we see them in pieces 
of dressed deal that have been exposed for a series of 
years to the light and the air. The winters of the Oolitic 
period in this northern locality must have been sufficiently 
severe to have given a thorough check to vegetation. We 
are next struck by the great inequality of size in these 
layers, as we find them shown in separate specimens. I 
brought with me one specimen in which there is a single 
layer nearly half an inch in breadth, and another in which, 
in no greater space, there occur fourteen different layers. 
The tree to which the one belonged must have been in- 
creasing in bulk fourteen times more rapidly than that of 
the other. Occasionally, too, we find very considerable 
diversities of size in the layers of the same specimen. 
One year added to its bulk nearly half an inch ; in another 
it increased scarce an eighth part. Then, as now, there 
must have been genial seasons, in which there luxuriated 
a rich-leaved vegetation, and other seasons of a severer 
cast, in which vegetation languished. My microscope, a 
botanist's, was of no great power ; but by using its three 
glasses together, and carefully grinding down small patches 
of the weathered wood till it began to darken, I could as- 
certain with certainty, from the structure of the cellular 
tissue, what, indeed, seemed sufficiently apparent to the 
naked eye from the general appearance of the specimens, 
that they all belonged to the coniferae. When viewed 
longitudinally, I could discern the elongated cells lying 



A geologist's portfolio. 307 

side by side, and the medullary rays stretching at right 
angles across; but my glass lacked power to show the 
glandular dots. When viewed transversely the regularly 
reticulated texture of the coniferse was very apparent. A 
bluish-gray limestone adhered to some of the specimens, 
and bore evidence in the same track. It abounded in 
cones and fragments of cones, in what seemed minute 
needle-shaped leaves, and in thin detached pieces of bark, 
like those which fall off in scales from the rind of so 
many of the coniferaB. The limestone bore also its fre- 
quent fragments of fern. There seemed nothing lacking 
to restore the picture. There rose before me a solemn 
forest of pines, deep, shaggy, and sombre; its opening 
slopes and withdrawing vistas were cheered by the lighter 
green of the bracken ; and far beyond, where the coast 
terminated, and the feathery tree-tops were relieved against 
the dark blue of the sea, a long line of surf tumbled inces- 
santly over a continuous reef of coral. 

I picked up one very fine specimen, which, though it 
weighed nearly a hundred weight, I resolved on getting 
transported to Edinburgh, and which now lies on the floor 
before me. It is a transverse cut of a portion of a large 
tree, including the pith, and measures twenty-three inches 
across. In the sections of trees, figured by Mr. Witham. 
in his interesting and valuable work, the original struc- 
ture seems much disorganized : a granular radiating spar 
occupies the greater portion of the interior ; and the tissue 
is found to exist in but detached portions. Here, on the 
contrary, the tissue exists unbroken from the pith to the 
outer ring. We may see one annual circle succeeding 
another in the average proportion of about ten per inch ; 
and though we cannot reckon them continuously, for 
there are darker shades in which they disappear, — shades 



308 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

which the polisher of the marble-cutter may yet succeed 
in dissipating, — the number of the whole must rather 
exceed than fall short of a hundred. However obscure 
the geologist may be in his eras generally, here at least is 
the record of one century. But how were its years filled ? 
I sat beside the root of a newly-felled fir some six or eight 
seasons ago, and amused myself, when the severed vessels 
were throwing up their turpentine in minute transparent 
globules, in reckoning the years by the rings, from the 
bark inward. Here, I said, is the year in which the Re- 
form Bill passed ; and this the year in which Canning 
died ; and this the year of the great commercial crisis ; and 
this the year of Waterloo ; and this of the burning of 
Moscow. The yearly rings of the Oolite have no such 
indices of recollection attached to them: we see their 
record in the marble, but know no more of contemporary 
history than that, when forests showed their fringes of 
lighter green on the hill-sides, and cell and fibre swelled 
under the rind, the promptings of instinct were busy all 
around and beneath, — that the pearly ammonite raised 
its tiny sails to the breeze, as the belemnite, with its 
many arms, shot past below, — that nameless birds mingled 
with flying reptiles, — and that, while the fierce crocodile 
watched in his pool for prey, the gigantic iguanodon 
stretched his long length of eighty feet in the sand. But 
who shall reveal the higher history of the time ? The 
reign of war and of death had commenced long before ; 
and who shall assert that moral evil had not long before 
cast its blighting shadows over the universe, — that there 
had not been that war in heaven in which the uncreated 
angel had overthrown the dragon, — or that unhappy intel- 
ligences did not wander, " seeking rest, but finding none," 
in an earth of " waste places," whose future sovereign still 
Lay hid in the deep purposes of Eternity ? 



309 



ASTEEA OF THE OOLITE, SUTHERLAND. 



The same deposit in which I found the wood embed- 
ded, contains large masses of coral, all apparently of one 
species, — not a branching coral, but of the kind which 
consists of large stone-like masses covered on the surface 
with stellular impressions, framed in polygons, and which 
composes the genus Astrea. I picked up one very fine 
specimen, which I have since got cut through and pol- 
ished. It presents a polygonal partitioning, of a delicate 
cream-color, that somewhat resembles the cells of a honey- 
comb. Each cell is filled with a brownish ground of car- 
bonate of lime ; and on this ground of brown there is a 
cream-colored star, composed of rays that proceed from 
the centre to the sides. One of these corals measured 
two feet and a half across in one direction, by two feet in 
another; and if it grew as slowly as some of its order in 
the present scene of things, its living existence must have 
stretched over a term of not less extent than that of its 
contemporary, the pine of the hundred rings. Some of 
the masses seem as if still adhering to the rocks on which 
they originally grew ; the pentagonal cells are still open, 
as if the inhabitants died but yesterday ; and the star-like 
lines iftside still retain their original character of thin par- 
titions, radiating outwards and upwards from a depressed 
centre. In other instances they have been torn from their 
places, and lie upturned in the shale, amid broken shells 
and fragments of wood. I brought with me one curious 
specimen perforated by an ancient pholas. The cavity 
exactly resembles those cavities of the existing Lithodo- 
mus shell which fretted so many of the calcareous masses 
that lay scattered on the beach on every side; but it is 
shut firmly up by the indurated shale in which the speci- 



310 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

men itself had lain buried, and a fragment of carbonized 
wood lies embedded in the entrance. The cave is cur- 
tained across by a wall of masonry, immensely more 
ancient than that which converted into a prison the cave 
of the Seven Sleepers. 

RECENT TYPES OF FOSSILS. 

An imagination curious to reerect and restore, finds 
assistance of no uninteresting kind among the pools and 
beneath the bunches of sea-weed which we find scattered, 
at the fall of the tide, over the surface of the Navidale 
deposits. One very minute pool of sea-water, scarcely 
thrice the size of a common washing basin, and scarcely 
half a foot in depth, furnished me with the recent types 
of well nigh all the fossils that lay embedded for several 
feet around it ; though there were few places in the bed 
where these lay more thickly. Three beautiful sea ane- 
mones — two of crimson, and the third of a greenish-buff* 
color — stretched out their sentient petals along the sides; 
and the minute currents around them showed that they 
were all employed in their proper trade of winnowing the 
water for its animalcular contents, — working that they 
might live. One of the three had fixed its crimson base 
on the white surface of a fossil coral ; the pentagonal cav- 
ities, out of each of which a creature of resembling form 
had once stretched its slim body and still minuter petals, 
to agitate the water with similar currents, were lying open 
around it. In another corner of the pool a sea-urchin was 
slowly dragging himself up the slope, with all his red 
fleshy halsers that could be brought to bear, and all his 
nearer han4spikes hard strained in the work. His pro- 
gress resembled that of the famous Russian boulder, trans- 



a geologist's portfolio. Sll 

ported for so many miles to make a pedestal for the statue 
of Peter the Great; with this difference, however, that 
here it was the boulder itself that was plying the hand- 
spikes and tightening the ropes. And, lo ! from the 
plane over which he moved there projected the remains 
of creatures of similar type ; — the rock was strewed with 
fossil handspikes, greater in bulk than his, and somewhat 
diverse in form, but whose general identity of character 
it was impossible to mistake. The spines of echini, fret- 
ted with lines of projections somewhat in the style of the 
pinnacles of a Gothic building, lie as thickly in this de- 
posit as in any deposit of the Chalk itself. The pool had 
its zoophytes of the arborescent form, — the rock its flus- 
tra ; the pool had its cluster of minute muscles, — the 
rock its scallops and ostrea ; the pool had its buccinidaB, — 
the rock its numerous whorls of some nameless turreted 
shell ; the pool had its cluster of serpulae ; the serpulae lay 
so thick in the rock, as to compose, in some layers, no 
inconsiderable proportion of its substance. 

BRORA COAL-FIELD OTHER THAN THE TRUE COAL MEASURES. 

A coal-field in other than the true Coal Measures is 
always an object of peculiar interest to the geologist ; and 
the coal-field of Brora is, in at least one respect, one of 
the most remarkable of these with which geologists are 
yet acquainted. The seams of the well-known Bovey 
coal of South Devon — a lignite of the Tertiary — are 
described as of greater depth ; but it burns so imperfectly, 
and emits so offensive an odor, that, though used by some 
of the poorer cottagers in the neighborhood, and some of 
the local potteries, it never became, nor can become, an 
article of commerce. It is curious merely as an immense 



812 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

accumulation of vegetable matter passing into the mineral 
state, — as, shall I venture to say, a sort of half-mineralized 
peat of the Tertiary, — a peat moss that, instead of over- 
lying, underlies the diluvium. In the Brora coal, as might 
be inferred from its much greater age, the process of 
mineralization is more complete ; and it furnishes, if I 
mistake not, the only instance in which a coal newer than 
that of the carboniferous era has been wrought for cen- 
turies, and made an article of trade. There were pits 
opened at Brora as early as the year 1598: they were 
reopened at various intermediate periods in the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries ; on one occasion in the 
middle part of the latter, by Williams, the author of a 
" Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom," which has 
been characterized by Lyell as " a work of great merit for 
its day ; " and during twelve years of the present century, 
from 1814 to 1826, there were extracted from but a single 
pit in this field no fewer than seventy thousand tons of 
coal. The Oolitic coal-field of Sutherland stands out in 
prominent relief amid the ligneous deposits that derive 
their origin from the later geological floras. And yet its 
commercial history does not serve to show that the specu- 
lations of the miner may be safely pursued in connection 
with any other than that one wonderful flora which has 
done so much more for man, with its coal and its iron, 
than all the gold mines of the world. The Brora work- 
ings were at no time more than barely remunerative ; and 
the fact that they were often opened to be as often aban- 
doned, shows that they must have occasionally fallen 
somewhat below even this low line. Latterly, at least, 
it was rather the deficient quality of the coal that mili- 
tated against the speculation, than any deficiency in the 
quantity found. It burned freely, and threw out a pow- 



a geologist's portfolio. 313 

erful flame; but it was accompanied by a peculiar odor, 
that seemed to tell rather of the vegetable of which it 
had been originally composed, than of the mineral into 
which it had been converted, and then sunk into a white 
light ash, which every breath of air sent floating over 
carpets and furniture. And so, when brought into compe- 
tition, in our northern ports, with the coal of the Mid- 
Lothian and English fields, it failed to take the market. 
The speculation of Williams was singularly unlucky. He 
became lessee of the entire field about the year 1764, and 
wrought it for nearly five years. There occurs near the 
centre of the main seam a band of pyritiferous concre- 
tions, which here, as elsewhere, have the quality of taking 
fire spontaneously when exposed in heaps to air and mois- 
ture, and which his miners had not been sufficiently careful 
in excluding from the coal. A cargo which he had ship- 
ped from Portsoy, in Banffshire, took fire in this way, in 
consequence, it has been said, of the vessel springing 
a leak ; and such was the alarm excited among his cus- 
tomers, that they declined dealing with him any longer 
for a commodity so dangerous. And so, after an ineffec- 
tual struggle, he had to relinquish his lease. 

LONDON MUSEUM OF ECONOMIC GEOLOGY. 

In the Museum of Economic Geology now in the course 
of forming in London, there are specimens exhibited of 
not only the various rude materials of art, furnished by 
the mine and the quarry, but also of what these can be 
converted into by the chemist and the mechanic. Not 
only does it show the gifts of the mineral kingdom to 
man, but the uses also to which man has applied them. 
The rough and unpromising block of marble stands side 

27 



314 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

by side with the exquisitely polished and delicately-sculp* 
tured vase. The bracelet of glittering steel, scarcely of 
less value than if wrought in gold, ranges in striking con- 
trast with the earthy, umbry nodule of clay-ironstone. 
There are series of specimens, too, illustrative of the 
various changes which an earth or metal assumes in its 
progress through the workshop or the laboratory. Here, 
for instance, is the ironstone nodule, — there the roasted 
ore, — yonder the fused mass ; the wrought bar succeeds ; 
then comes the rudely-blocked ornament or implement; 
and, last of all, the exquisitely finished piece of work, as 
we find it in the cutler's warehouse or the jeweller's shop. 
I am not aware whether the museum also exhibits its 
sets of specimens illustrative of substances, elaborated, not 
by man, but by nature herself; and elaborated, if one may 
so speak, on the principle of serial processes and succeed- 
ing stages. The arrangement in many cases would have 
to proceed, no doubt, on a basis of hypothesis ; but the 
cases would also be many in which the hypothesis would, 
at least, not seem a forced one. It was suggested to me 
on the Brora coal-field, that the process through which 
nature makes coal might be strikingly illustrated in this 
style. One might almost venture to begin one's serial col- 
lection with a well-selected piece of fresh peat, containing 
its fragments of wood, its few blackened reeds, its fern- 
stalks, and its club-mosses. Another specimen of more 
solid homogeneous structure, and darker hue, cut from the 
bottom of some deep morass, might be placed second in 
the series. Then might come a first specimen of Bovey 
coal, taken from under its eight or ten feet of Tertiary 
clay, — a specimen of light and friable texture, and that 
exhibited more of its original and vegetable qualities than 
of its acquired mineral ones. A second specimen, brought 



A geologist's portfolio. 315 

from a deeper bed of the same deposit, might be chosen 
by the darker brown of its color, and its nearer approxi- 
mation to the structure of pit-coal. The Oolitic coal of 
the Brora or Yorkshire field might furnish at least two 
specimens more. And thus the collector might pass on, 
by easy gradations, to the true Coal Measures, and down 
through these to the deeply-seated anthracite of Ireland, 
or the still more deeply-seated anthracite of America, — 
not altogether so assured of his arrangement, perhaps, as 
in dealing with the processes of the laboratory or the 
workshop, but at least tolerably sure that both chemists 
and naturalists would find fewer reasons to challenge than 
to confirm it. 



BRORA PEAT-MOSSES OF THE OOLITE. 

The Brora field, so various in its deposits, must have ex- 
isted in many various states, — now covered by salt water, 
now by fresh, — now underlying some sluggish estuary, — 
now presenting, perchance, a superaqueous surface, dark- 
ened by accumulations of vegetable matter, — and now, 
again, let down into the green depths of the sea. To real- 
ize such a change as the last, one has but to cross the 
Moray Frith at this point to the opposite land, and there 
see a peat-moss covered, during stream tides, by from two 
to three fathoms of water, and partially overlaid by a 
stratum of sea-sand, charged with its characteristic shells. 
It is a small coal-bed, kneaded out and laid by, though 
still in its state of extremest unripeness, — a coal-bed in 
the raw material; and there are not a few such on the 
coasts of both Britain and Ireland. Professor Fleming's 
description of the submerged forests of the Friths of 
Forth and Tay must be familiar to many of my readers. 



316 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

They must have heard, too, through the far-known " Prin- 
ciples " of Lyell, of the submerged forests of Lancashire. 
" In passing over Black Sod Bay, in a clear, calm morn- 
ing," says a late tourist in Ems and Tyrawly, "I could 
see, fathoms down, the roots of trees that seemed of the 
same sort as are every day dug out of our bogs." Now, 
we do not know that the Oolite had properly its peat- 
mosses. The climate, though its pines had their well- 
marked annual rings, seems, judging from its other pro- 
ductions, to have been warmer than those in which peat 
now accumulates ; but there can be no doubt that both it 
and the true Coal Measures must have had their vast 
accumulations of vegetable matter, formed, in many in- 
stances, on the spot on which the vegetable matter grew ; 
and no one surely need ask a better definition of a peat- 
moss. A peat-moss, in the present state of things, is sim- 
ply an accumulation of vegetable matter formed on the 
spot on which it grew. These, as I have said, we fre- 
quently find let down on our coasts far beneath the sea- 
level, and covered up by marine deposits ; and the fact 
furnishes a first and important step in the proposed serial 
arrangement of coal in the forming. May I not further 
add, that Professor Johnston, of Durham, so well known 
in the field of geological chemistry, regards all our coal- 
seams, whether of the Carboniferous period or of the Oo- 
litic, as mere beds of ancient peat, mineralized in the labo- 
ratory of Nature ? 

QUARRY OF BRAAMBURY UPPER OOLITE, SUTHERLAND. 

On entering the quarry hollowed on the southern emi- 
nence, one is first struck by the character of the broken 
masses of stone that lie scattered over the excavations. 



A geologist's portfolio. 317 

The rubbish abounds in what seem fragments of a very 
exquisite sculpture. The shells and lignites, which it con- 
tains in vast numbers, exist as mere impressions in the 
white sandstone, and look as if fresh from the chisel of a 
Thorn or Forrest. But even these masters of their art 
would confess themselves outdone here in beauty of finish. 
Their best works don't stand the microscope ; whereas the 
carvings of the Upper Oolite here, though in sandstone, 
mightily improve under it. The cast of a broken frag- 
ment of wood at present before me shows not only the 
markings of the annual rings, but also the microscopic 
striae of the vegetable fibre, — a niceness of impression 
impossible in any sandstone that had not what the sand- 
stones of this quarry have, — a large mixture of calcare- 
ous cement. I remember that, on my first introduction to 
the excavations of Braambury, — for such is the name of 
the quarry, — the vast amount of what seemed broken 
sculpture in the rubbish reminded me of some of Ten- 
nant's singularly happy descriptions in his "Dingin down 
o' the Cathedral." They seemed mememorials of a time 
when, to the signal detriment of ecclesiastical architecture 
in Scotland, and all the good solid religion that springs 
out of sandstone, 

" Ilk tirlie-wirlie mament bra, 

That had for centuries ane and a' 

Brankit on bunker or on wa', 

Cam turablin tap o'er tail * * 

Whan in ilk kirk the angry folk 

Carv't wark, an ax-ch, an pillar broke." 

I had not a few other recollections of the quarry of 
Braambury. Nothing can be more interesting to the geol- 
ogist than its fossils, and nothing more annoying, at times, 
to the workman. Occurring often in the wrought stone, 
they occasion sad gaps and deplorable breaches, where the 

27* 



318 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

plane should be smooth or the moulding sharp. I remem- 
ber laying open, on one occasion, a beautiful cast that had 
once been a belemnite, but that had become a mere cavity 
in which a belemnite might be moulded, — for even this 
solid fossil, that so doggedly preserves its substance in 
most other deposits, is absorbed by the sandstone of 
Braambury. And greatly did I admire its peculiar state 
of keeping. The smooth, cylindrical hollow was partitioned 
across by two stony diaphragms, thin as bits of drawing- 
paper; for ere the absorbing-process had begun, the fossil 
had been broken into three pieces by the superincumbent 
weight, and the minute strips of sand which had filled up 
the cracks had hardened into stone. The point was sharp 
and smooth ; a rectilinear convex ridge showed the place 
of the abdominal groove ; a cone at the base, lined trans- 
versely, represented the chambered shell of the interior. 
There could not be a more interesting specimen for a 
museum ; but, alas ! it occupied the polished plane of a 
tombstone, just where the hicjacet should have been; and 
though it symbolized the sentence wonderfully well, it was 
a symbol which I feared few would succeed in interpreting. 
I pointed it out to a brother workman. " Ah," said he, 
"you have got one of these terrrible tangle-holes; they're 
the dash'dest things in all the quarry." 

Many a curious thing besides does this quarry contain : 
boles of trees, that look as if sculptured in the white sand- 
stone, with their gnarled and twisted knots and furrowed 
rinds ; striated reeds of the same brittle material, that 
seem the fluted columns of architectural models ; club- 
mosses, with their gracefully-disposed branches; rounded 
stems, scaled like the cones of the fir ; impressions of fi- 
brous, sword-shaped leaves, that resemble the leaves of 
the iris ; and the casts of fragmentary masses of timber, 



319 



deeply fretted by the involved and tortuous gnawings of 
some marine worm. Such are a few of the sculptured 
representations of the flora of the period, — things more 
delicate by a great deal than those carved flowers of Mel- 
rose which we find described with such picturesque effect 
by Sir Walter. And its fauna we see represented quite as 
interestingly as its flora. Its sculptured Pectens remind us 
of those of a Grecian frieze ; a beautifully-ribbed Cardium 
has proved a still finer subject for the chisel ; its Gryphites 
stand out in the boldest style of art. One very striking 
Ammonite (Ammonite perarmatus) exhibits a double row 
of prominent cones, that run along the spiral windings, 
and give to it the appearance of an Ionic volute inge- 
niously rusticated ; and another Ammonite, that takes its 
name from the quarry (Ammonite Braamburiensis), pre- 
sents on its smooth, broad surface, — for in form it resem- 
bles some of our recent nautili, — the gracefully-involved 
lines of the internal partitioning, as sharp and distinct as 
if traced on copper by the burin. The traveller explores 
and examines, and finds the rude excavation on the hill- 
side converted into the studio of some wonderful sculptor. 
In the quarry opened on the other eminence there are 
similar appearances presented, but the stone is softer, and 
the impressions less sharp. 

GLACIERS AND MORAINES OF SUTHERLAND. 

Let us mark the abrupt and imposing character of the 
hills. They rise dark, lofty, and bare, and show — to em- 
ploy a graphic Highland phrase — their bones sticking 
through the skin. They must have been well swept, 
surely; and as they are composed mainly of Old Red 
Sandstone conglomerate in this locality, — for we have left 



320 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

behind us the granitic hills of Navidale and Loth, — their 
sweepings, could we but find them, would have, doubtless, 
a well-marked character. And now let us turn to appear- 
ances of another kind. We stand on the polished surface 
of the rock, with its rectilinear grooves and scratches, and, 
when we look upwards along the lines, see the mountains 
and the valley ; but what see we when we look downwards 
along the lines ? Something exceedingly curious indeed ; 
— double and triple ranges of miniature hills, composed of 
boulders and gravel, the veritable conglomerate sweepings 
of the mountain-slopes and the valley, mixed with sweep- 
ings of the more distant primary hills that rise behind. 
There they lie, in lines that preserve such a rude parallel- 
ism to the steep range from which they were originally 
scraped, as the waves that rebound from a seaward barrier 
of cliff maintain to the line of the barrier. Varying from 
thirty to forty feet in height, and steep and pyramidal, in 
the cross section, as roofs of houses, they run in contin- 
uous undulating lines of from a hundred yards to half a 
mile in length. Three such lines, with their intervening 
valleys, occur between the base of Braambury Hill and the 
village of Brora, like inner, outer, and middle mounds of 
circumvallation in an ancient hill-fort. If one steadily 
rakes, with the edge of one's moist palm, the scattered 
crumbs on a polished tea-table, they form, of course, into 
irregular lines, presenting in the transverse section a 
rudely angular form ; and in the direction in which they 
have been swept, the moisture from the palm furrows the 
mahogany with minute streaks of dimness. The illustra- 
tion is one on the smallest scale possible. But if the palm 
be tolerably moist, the crumbs tolerably abundant, and the 
polish of the mahogany brought brightly out, and if we 
rake into rude parallelism in this way, line after line from 



a geologist's portfolio. 321 

the front of some platter or bread-dish, upturned to repre- 
sent the line of hills, we shall have provided ourselves with 
no very inadequate model of the phenomena of Braam- 
buiy. But what palm of inconceivable weight, breadth, 
and strength, could have been employed here in thus 
raking the debris into lines of hills half a mile in length 
by at least thirty feet in height, and in pressing into 
smoothness, as it passed, the asperities of the solid rocks 
below? The reader has already anticipated the reply. 
We have before us indications of an ancient glacier, the 
most unequivocal that are to be found, perhaps, anywhere 
in the kingdom : there is not a condition or accompani- 
ment wanting. I have had my doubts regarding glacial 
agency in Scotland; but, after visiting this locality a 
twelvemonth ago, I found doubt impossible ; and I would 
now fain recommend the skeptical to suspend their ulti- 
mate decision on the point, until such time as they shall 
have acquainted themselves with the grooved and polished 
rocks of Braambury, and the parallel moraines that stretch 
out around its base. 

I had lacked time, during my visit of the previous sea- 
son, to examine the moraines that lie in the opening of the 
valley higher up, and now set out to explore them. The 
day had become exceedingly pleasant. A few cottony- 
looking wreaths of mist still mottled the hills, and the sky 
overhead was still laden with clouds ; but ever and anon 
the sun broke out in hasty glimpses, that went flashing 
across the dark moors, now lighting up some bosky recess 
or abrupt cliff, now casting into strong prominence some 
insulated moraine. The hollow between Braambury and 
the hills is occupied, as I have said, by an extensive mo- 
rass, in which the inhabitants of the neighborhood dig 
their winter fuel, and which we find fretted, in conse- 



322 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

quence, by numerous rectilinear cavities, filled with an inky- 
water, and roughened and darkened on its drier swellings 
with innumerable parallelograms of peat. I passed an 
opening in which there were no fewer than five gnarled, 
short-stemmed fir-trees, laid bare. They lay clustered to- 
gether, as if uprooted and thrown down by some tremen- 
dous hurricane, — presenting exactly such appearances as 
I have seen in the woods of Cromarty after the hurricane 
of November 1830, when, in less than an hour, three thou- 
sand full-grown trees were blown down in one not very 
extensive wood, and lay heaped on some of the more ex- 
posed eminences in groups of six and eight. A few hun- 
dred yards from the prostrate trees there rises, amid the 
morass, a solitary moraine. I could see its gravelly root 
extending downwards under the peat, which, in the slow 
course of ages, had accumulated around it, and found the 
conviction pressing upon me, that, many centuries ago, 
when the five prostrate pines were living denizens of the 
forest, and the moss which now enveloped them had not 
formed, this insulated hill must have raised its heathy 
ridge over the trees, and borne the marks of an antiquity 
apparently not less remote than those which it bears now. 
And then, long ere the hill itself had formed, the same re- 
mark must have applied, with at least equal force, to the 
Oolitic rock below. We see that, when overlaid by the 
ponderous ice, it must have been exactly the same sort of 
hard, brittle sandstone it is at the present moment. As 
shown by the slim partitionings that divide internally its 
casts of Belemnites, it must have hardened ere its fossils 
were absorbed ; and, as shown by its polished and striated 
surfaces, its fossils must have been absorbed ere the glacier 
slid over it. We see laid bare in the lines of the striae, the 
casts of Gryphites, Pectens, and Terebratula; we see, 



A geologist's portfolio. 323 

further, that the hollows which they formed were weak 
places in the stone, and that the ice, breaking through, had 
crushed into them the minute fragments of which their 
roofs had been composed ; and so infer, from the appear- 
ances, that the newer Oolite of Sutherland must have been 
as firm a building-stone in the ages of the glaciers as it is 
now. 

As we approach the valley of the Brora, we see a long, 
well-marked moraine sweeping in a curved line along the 
base of the hill that forms its northern boundary of en- 
trance, and are again reminded, by the general parallelism 
of moraine and hill, of the reversed wave thrown back from 
a barrier of rock. In the gorge of the valley, immediately 
below where the river expands into a fine wild lake, we 
find the moraines very abundant, but preserving no regu- 
larity of line. They exist as a broken, cockling sea of 
miniature hills ; and, to follow up the twice-used illustra- 
tion, remind one of rebounding waves at the opening of a 
rocky bay, where the lines meet and cross, and break one 
another into fragments. Like many of the other moraines 
of the Highlands, they were of mark enough to attract the 
notice of the old imaginative Celtae, who called them Tom- 
hans, and believed them to be haunts of the fairies,— dom- 
iciles whose enchanted places of entrance might be discov- 
ered on just one night of the year, but which no man, not 
desirous of becoming a denizen of fairyland, would do well 
to enter. The lake above is a fine, lonely sheet of water, 
fringed with birch, and overlooked by many a green, unin- 
habited spot, dimly barred by the plough. A range of 
stern, solemn-looking hills rise steep and precipitous on 
either hand ; while a single picturesque hill, with abrupt 
sides and a tabular summit, terminates the upward vista 
some six or eight miles away. I saw in one reedy bay a 



324 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

whole community of water-lilies opening their broad white 
petals and golden stamens to the light ; and, wishing to 
possess myself of one that grew nearer the shore than any 
of the others, and having no such companion as Cowper's 
dog Beau to bring it me, I cut a long switch of birch, and 
struck sharply at the stem, that I might decapitate it, and 
then steer it to land. But the blow, though repeated and 
re-repeated, fell short ; and I had drawn my last, when up 
there started from the bottom a splendid lily, two-thirds 
developed, — a true Venus, that, rising from the water, 
looked up to the light, neck-deep, with the rest. The agi- 
tation occasioned by the strokes had burst the calix, and, 
true to its nature, up the prematurely-liberated flower had 
sprung. The image which the incident furnished mingled 
curiously with my attempted restorations of the ancient 
state of the valley. The delicate lily, rising to the surface 
in its quiet, sheltered bay, during a bright glimpse of sun- 
shine, formed an interesting point of contrast to what 
seemed a vast foaming river of ice, that rose on the hill- 
sides more than half their height, and swept downwards, 
till where it terminated in the plain, in an abrupt moving 
precipice, that ploughed before it, in its irresistible march, 
huge hills of gravel and stone. 

LEVEL STEPPES OF RUSSIA, AND THEORY OF MORAINES. 

In the level steppes of Russia, where the traveller may 
journey without seeing a hill for weeks together, the rocks 
have their grooved and polished surfaces. And even in 
localities where there are hills, the hills not unfrequently 
merely add to the difficulty. The lofty top of Schehallien, 
for instance, is grooved and polished ; and, pray, from what 
neighboring eminence could the glacier have descended on 
it ? Extreme, however, as the difficulties that environ the 



A GEOLOGIST'S PORTFOLIO. 325 

phenomena may seem, they have been manfully met by 
Agassiz, and dealt with in a style in which only a man of 
genius could have dealt with anything. And if difficulties 
still attend his theory, there are at least other difficulties 
which it ingeniously obviates ; and it seems but right, at 
all events, to give it generous entertainment and a fair 
trial, until such time as it may be found untenable, or until 
at least something better turns up to set in its place. 

The fiat steppes of Russia have, I have said, their groov- 
ings and polishings : they have also their moraine ; and so 
enormous is the extent of the latter, that for week after 
week the traveller may find it stretching through the cen- 
tral wilds of the empire, on and on, without apparent ter- 
minationj by North Novogorod towards Pinsk, as far as 
the confines of Silesia. It exists as a broad belt of erratic 
blocks, mingled with heaps of gravel, and resembles, from 
its linear continuity, the scattered remains of some such 
vast wall as that which protected of old the Chinese fron- 
tier from the Tartar. And here, says Agassiz, is the mo- 
raine of a glacier that had for its centre no group of local 
eminences, no vanished Alps of the Frozen Ocean, but the 
North Pole itself. The ice of the Southern Pole advances 
as far. Could we but reverse the conditions of the two 
poles, the northern icy barrier would extend to the English 
Channel, and the whole British islands would lie enveloped 
in one vast glacial winding-sheet, that, overlying the sum- 
mits of our hills, would furrow with its parallel stria? even 
the granitic top of Schehallien. 

A complete reversal of the conditions of the two poles 
would account, doubtless, for many of the phenomena 
existing in connection with the boulder-clay, which seem 
otherwise so inexplicable. But is the reversal itself pos- 
sible ? A Laplace or Lagrange could perhaps answer the 

28 



326 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

question. This much, however, men of lower attainments 
may know, — that the meteorological condition of the 
two poles are very different, — the icy barrier advancing, 
in the case of the one, many degrees nearer the equator 
than it does in the case of the other ; that their astronom- 
ical condition is also very different, the sun being many 
millions of miles nearer the one in winter, and nearer the 
other in summer. It may be known, further, that these 
astronomical conditions are in a state of gradual change ; 
that, so far at least, as human observation extends, the 
change has been steadily progressing in one direction ; 
that, should it but continue, a time must inevitably arrive 
when their astronomical circumstances shall be wholly re- 
versed, — a time when the sun shall look down upon our 
northern hemisphere in aphelion in winter, and in perihe- 
lion in summer. True, we do not yet know that the me- 
teorological differences of the poles depend on their astro- 
nomical differences, or whether the gradual diminution in 
the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, which has been lessen- 
ing these latter differences ever since astronomers regis- 
tered their observations, may not be like the change in the 
ecliptic, — the result of mere oscillation, limited to a few 
degrees. 

Let us, however, conclude the case to be otherwise : let 
us deem the oscillations in the earth's orbit to be so great 
as to involve an alternate progress in the sun, between his 
two foci ; let us further infer a dependence between his 
place in each and the meteorological condition of the 
poles. We stand, let us suppose, on the summit of a hill ; 
but, as if an immense wedge had been thrust between our 
feet and the soil, we rise to a higher elevation on an in- 
clined plane of ice, and look over a frozen continent^ 
enlivened by no winding arms of the sea, and bounded 
by no shore. In the words of Coleridge, 



A geologist's portfolio. 327 

" The ice is here; the ice is there; 
The ice is all around ; 
It cracks, and growls, and roars, and howls, 
A wild and ceaseless sound." 

It is summer ; and the sun, in perihelion, looks down with 
intense glare on the rugged surface. There is a ceaseless 
dash of streams that come leaping from the more exposed 
ridges, as they shrink and lessen in the heat, or patter from 
the sunlit pinnacles, like rain from the eaves of a roof in a 
thunder-shower. They disappear in cracks and fissures; 
and we may hear the sound, rising from where they break 
themselves, far beneath, in chill caverns and gloomy re- 
cesses, where, even at this season, at noon, the tempera- 
ture rises but little above the freezing-point, and sinks far 
beneath it every evening as the sun declines. The night 
shall scarce have come on when all these water-courses 
shall be bound up by the frost, and the melted accumula- 
tions which they precipitated into the fissures beneath 
shall be converted into expansive wedges of ice, under the 
influence of which the whole ice-continent shall be moving 
slowly onwards over the buried land. Millions of millions 
of wedges shall ply their work during the night on every 
square mile of surface, and the coming day shall prepare 
its millions of millions more. There is thus a slow but 
steady motion induced towards the open space where the 
huge glacier terminates ; the rocks far below grind down 
into a clayey paste, as the ponderous mass goes crushing 
over them, — deliberate, when at its quickest, as the hour- 
hand of a time-piece, — and vast fragments are borne away 
from submerged peaks and precipices by the enclasping 
solid, just as ordinary streams bear along their fragments 
of rock and stone from the banks and ridges that lie most 



328 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

exposed to the sweep of their currents. All around, ac- 
cording to Milton, 

" A frozen continent 
Lies dark and wild, beat by perpetual storms." 

Not a peak of our higher hills appears : all are enveloped 
in their cerements of cold and death. Even along the 
flanks of the gigantic Alps, the groovings and polishings 
rise, says Agassiz, to an elevation of nine thousand feet ; 
and then, and not before, do we find the pinnacles that 
overlooked the scene standing up sharp and unworn. If 
we ask a varied prospect, we must remove from our pres- 
ent stand, to where Mont Blanc and his compeers raise 
their white summits over the line of the horizon, to give 
earnest of a buried continent, or to where the smoke and 
fire of Hecla ascends amid the level from a dripping crater 
of ice. 

CROMARTY. 

Cromarty, — my own especial manor, which I have so 
often beat over, but not yet half exhausted, — presents to 
the geologist one of the most interesting centres of explor- 
ation in Scotland. Does he wish thoroughly to study our 
Scotch Lias, Upper and Lower, with the Oolitic member 
which immediately overlies it ? — then let him remove to 
Cromarty, and study it there. Is he solicitous to acquaint 
himself with the fossils of the Lower 1 Old Red Sandstone 
in that state of finest preservation in which the microscope 
finds most of beauty and finish in them? — then let him 
by all means settle at Cromarty. Is he wishful of know- 
ing much about the last elevated of our granitic hill 

i Now ascertained to be Middle. 



329 



ranges, — a range newer, apparently, than many of our 
south-country traps? — let him not hesitate to take lodg- 
ings at Cromarty. Is he curious regarding our boulder- 
clay ? — let him set himself carefully to examine the splen- 
did sections which it presents in the neighborhood of 
Cromarty. Does he feel aught of interest in our' raised 
beaches ? — then let him come and live upon one at Cro- 
marty. Is he desirous of furnishing himself with a key 
to the geology of the north of Scotland generally? — in 
no place will he be able to possess himself of so complete 
a key as among the upturned strata of Cromarty. Had 
he to grope his way along a course of discovery, he might 
find the district yielding up its more interesting phenom- 
ena but slowly. To know its Lias deposits thoroughly 
would be a work of months, and to know its Old Red 
Sandstone, a work of years ; but with some intelligent 
guide to point out to him the localities to which his atten- 
tion should be directed, and all in them that has been 
done and observed already, he would find that much 
might be accomplished in the course of a single week, — 
especially in the long calm days of July, when the more 
exposed shores of the district, with all their insulated 
stacks and ledges, and all their deep-sea caves, may be 
explored by boat. 



CAVES OF CROXARTY, OR THE ART OF SEEING OVER THE 
ART OF THEORIZING. 

We swept ownwards through the noble opening of 
the Cromarty Frith, and landed under the southern Sutor, 
on a piece of rocky beach, overhung by a gloomy semi- 
circular range of precipices. The terminal points of the 
range stand so far out into the sea, as to render inacces- 

28* 



380 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

sible, save by boat, or at the fall of ebb in stream tides, 
the piece of crescent-shaped beach within. Each of the 
two promontories is occupied by a cave in which the sea 
at flood stands some ten or twelve feet over the gravel 
bottom, and there are three other caves in the semicircle, 
into which the tide has not entered since it fell back from 
the old coast line. The larger and deeper of the three 
caves in the semicircular inflection is mainly that which 
we had landed to explore. It runs a hundred and fifty 
feet into the granitic rock, in the line of a fault that seems 
first to have opened some eight or ten feet, and then, lean- 
ing back, to have closed its sides atop, forming in this way 
a long angular hollow. It has borne for centuries the 
name of the Doo-cot, i. e. Dove-cot, Cave, and has been' 
from time immemorial a haunt of pigeons. We approach 
the opening. There is a rank vegetation springing up in 
front, where the precipice beetles over, and a small stream 
comes pattering in detached drops like those of a thunder- 
shower; and we see luxuriating under it, in vast abun- 
dance, the hot, bitter, fleshy-leaved scurvy-grass, of which 
Cook made such large use, in his voyages, as an anti-scor- 
butic. The floor is damp and mouldy ; the green ropy 
sides, which rise some five-and-twenty feet ere they close, 
are thickly furrowed by ridges of stalactites, that become 
purer and whiter as we retire from the light and the vege- 
tative influences, and present in the deeper recesses of the 
cave the hue of statuary marble. The last vegetable that 
appears is a minute delicate moss, about half an inch in 
length, which slants outwards to the light on the promi- 
nence of the sides, and overlies myriads of similar sprigs 
of moss, long since converted into stone, but which, faith- 
ful in death to the ruling law of their lives, still point, like 
the others, to the free air and sunshine. As we step on- 



A geologist's portfolio. 331 

wards, we exchange the brightness of noon for the mel- 
lower light of evening. A few steps farther, and evening 
has deepened into twilight. We still advance : and twi- 
light gives place to a gloom dusky as that of midnight. 
We grope on, till the rock closes before us ; and, turning 
round, see the blue waves of the frith through the long, 
dark vista, as if we viewed them through the tube of some 
immense telescope. We strike a light. The roof and 
sides are crusted with white stalactites, that depend from 
the one like icicles from the eaves of a roof in a severe 
frost, and stand out from the other in pure, semi-transpar- 
ent ridges, that resemble the folds of a piece of white 
drapery dropped from the roof; while the floor below has 
its rough pavement of stalagmite, that stands up, wherever 
the drops descend, in rounded prominences, like the bases 
of columns. The marvel has become somewhat old-fash- 
ioned since the days when Buchanan described the drop- 
ping cave of Slains, — " where the water, as it descends 
drop by drop, is converted into pyramids of stone," — as 
one of the wonders of Scotland, and deemed it necessary 
to strengthen the credibility of his statement by adding, 
that he had been "informed by persons of undoubted 
veracity that there existed a similar cave among the Pyr- 
enees." Here, however, is a puzzle to exercise our ingenuity. 
Some of the minuter stalactites of the roof, after descend- 
ing perpendicularly, or at least nearly so, for a few inches, 
turn up again, and form a hook, to which one may sus- 
pend one's watch by the ring ; while there are others that 
form a loop, attached to the roof at both ends. Pray, how 
could the descending drop have returned upwards to form 
the hook, or what attractive power could have drawn two 
drops together, to compose the eliptical curve of the loop ? 
The problem is not quite a simple one. It is sufficiently 



332 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

hard at least, as it has to deal with only half-ounces of 
rock, to inculcate caution on the theorists who profess to 
deal with whole continents of similar material. Let us 
examine somewhat narrowly. Dark as the recess is, and 
though vegetation fails full fifty feet nearer the entrance 
than where we now stand, the place is not without its 
inhabitants. We see among the dewy damps of the roof 
the glistening threads of some minute spider, stretching 
in lines or depending in loops. And just look here. Along 
this loop there runs a single drop. Observe how it de- 
scends, with but a slight inclination, for about two inches 
or so, and then turns round for about three quarters of an 
inch more; observe further, that along this other loop 
there trickle two drops, one on each side ; that, as a conse- 
quence of the balance which they form the one against the 
other, their descent has a much greater sweep ; and that, 
uniting in the centre, they fall together. We have found 
a solution of our riddle, and received one proof more of 
the superiority of the simple art of seeing over the ingen- 
ious art of theorizing. 

But let us proceed to the proper business of the excur- 
sion. We have provided ourselves with tools for digging; 
and, selecting a spot some thirty feet within the cavern, 
where the bottom seems composed of a damp dark mould, 
we set ourselves, with spade and pick-axe, to penetrate 
to the sea-gravel beneath. The soil yields as easily to the 
tool as a piece of garden mould ; and, turning it up to the 
light in cubical adhesive masses, we find it consisting of 
an impalpable brown earth, that exactly resembles raw 
umber. We have fallen on a bed of pure guano, not 
quite so rich, perhaps, as that which our agriculturists 
export from the rocky islets of South America, at the rate 
of about fourteen pounds per ton, for it must have been 



333 



formed originally of vegetable, not animal matter, and we 
find that it lacks the strong ammonical smell of the guano 
produced by predacious water-birds; but, judging from 
its appearance, and from the high estimate formed of old 
of the dung of pigeons as a manure, it must be of value 
enough to deserve removal from the damp unproductive 
floor of the Doo-cot. "We find the bed which it com- 
poses extending downwards from two to three feet, and 
filling the cavern from side to side. A rock-gravel lies 
below, hardened into an imperfect breccia by a ferrugin- 
ous cement; but the rotting moisture exuded from the 
guano has been unfavorable, apparently, to the preserva- 
tion of the shells, and we find that it contains nothing 
organic. We again remove to the inner recesses of the 
cave. Mark first, that peculiar appearance along the sides. 
There stands out, at the height of about four feet from 
the present floor, what seems a rude projecting cornice of 
rock-gravel, bound together by the stalactitical cement : 
the projection at one point somewhat exceeds eighteen 
inches ; and we find it bearing short-stemmed stalagmites 
atop, just like the rugged pavement below. To use a 
homely but apt illustration, the appearance is that pre- 
sented by the lower part of a tallow-candle that had been 
burning, exposed to a current of air, with its grease run- 
ning down in ridges on the sides, and then spreading out 
on the margin of the metal socket, when, after raising it 
out of the candlestick, we see the lower accumulation pro- 
jecting from it like a cornice. That line of projecting 
gravel indicates the level at which the floor of the cavern 
once stood. If we remove the looser parts of the present 
floor, we shall find its place indicated by just a similar line 
of projection. The loose sea-gravel could have adhered 
to the sides only by having formed the part of the floor in 



334 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

contact with them, until the stalagmitical substance had 
taken effect upon it, by binding it into a mass, and fixing 
it where it had lain. Let us break into one of the projec- 
tions. We find it a true breccia, thickly interspersed with 
such fragments of shells as we may pick up by hundreds 
in the neighboring sea-caves, where the incessant beat of 
the surf on the hard rocks against which it dashes breaks 
them into rounded fragments. There, for instance, is a 
massy little bit of the strong smooth buckie, (Fusus An- 
tiquus), the largest of British univalves ; and there a frag- 
ment equally massy of the Icelandic Venus, — both of 
them productions of the oceans, and of such rivers as the 
Friths of Cromarty and Dornoch. The materials of the 
projecting cornice are those of a cavern-beach much ex- 
posed to the roll of the surf. 

Let us now see what our several points of circumstan- 
tial evidence amount to. First, then, the bottom of the 
cave must have stood at one time at least four feet over 
its present level, and at least fourteen feet over the level 
of the two sea-caves outside ; and yet, just as the sea now 
covers them, must the sea at that remote period have 
covered it. The incessant wave must have resounded 
along these silent walls as it dashed sullenly onwards, and 
awakened all their echoes with its harsh rattle as it rolled 
back. The cavern at that early time, like all the other 
deep-sea caves of the coast, could have had no crust of 
stalactites. Its sides and roof must have been as dark and 
bare as the sides and roofs of the caves outside, where the 
spray washes away every film of calcareous matter ere it 
has been deposited for half a day. A sudden elevation 
of the coast took place, and sudden it must have been, for 
the loose gravel beach, with its finely comminuted shells, 
Was at once raised beyond the influence of the tides ; the 



A geologist's portfolio. 335 

stalactitical ridges began to form on the walls, and the 
sea-gravel to consolidate — where these terminated be- 
neath, and the petrifying water oozed through — into the 
brecciated cornice. But the waves from the lower line 
had been encroaching inwards, bit by bit, from the cavern's 
mouth, washing down the floor to their own reduced level, 
until they had at length scooped it all out, and left but 
the hardened projections to mark where it had stood. 
The cave, though now occupied by only the higher tides, 
had again become, in some sort, a sea-cave, when a second 
elevation of the land raised it to its present level. The 
covering of stalactites thickened along its sides; its minute 
mosses lived, died, and became marble ; and, as age suc- 
ceeded age, the dark recesses in its roof were cheered by 
the unerring affections of instinct; and brood after brood, 
reared with assiduous labor to maturity, went forth, some 
again to return to their hereditary cells, some to take up 
their abodes with man. I need scarce say, that the rock, 
or white-backed dove, is the original of our domestic 
species. 

LINE OF CROMARTY SUTOR. 

We find that there leaned against one of the precipices 
of the Southern Sutor, now washed by the spring tides, a 
talus of loose debris, such as we see still leaning against 
the precipices of the old coast line, and that a calcareous 
spring, dropping upon it from an upper ledge, had, in the 
course of years, converted its apex into a hard breccia and 
cemented it to the rock, while the base below remained 
incoherent as at first. During this period it must have 
Iain beyond the sweep of the waves. But a change of 
level took place ; the waves came dashing against the 
loose debris, and swept it away ; and all that now remains 



336 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

of the talus is the consolidated apex, projecting about 
three feet from the rock. Under another precipice of the 
Cromarty Sutor we find a line of consolidated debris — 
which, like the breccia of the apex, must have been the 
work of a calcareous spring — running out about fifty feet 
into the ebb, where it is altogether impossible it could 
have formed now. The spring must have flowed down- 
wards for these fifty feet ere it reached the sea; for no 
sooner could it have touched the latter than its waters 
would have been diffused and lost ; and, even could they 
have avoided such diffusion, the waves must have pre- 
vented the loose gravel on which the calcareous matter 
acted from remaining sufficiently stationary for a single 
tide. In each of these cases is the value of the evidence 
enhanced by the circumstances in which it is given. Both 
the talus and the brecciated line were formed on a basis 
of gigantic rock, so hard that it strikes fire with steel, and 
which only a general change of level could have let down 
to the influence of the tide, or elevated over it. 



LESSON TO YOUNG GEOLOGISTS FROM CLAY-BED OF THE 
NORTHERN SUTOR. 

There is a stiff, blue clay much used in Cromarty and the 
neighborhood for rendering the bottom of ponds water- 
tight, and the foundations of cellars impervious to the 
land-springs, and which, save for its greater tenacity, much 
resembles the blue boulder-clay of our Coal Measures. It 
is found in the ebb at half-tide, in a bed varying from 
eighteen inches ^to three feet in thickness, which overlies 
the red boulder-clay, and contains minute fragments of 
shells, too much broken to be distinguished. I had deemed 
it a sort of re-formation from strata of a grayish-colored 



A geologist's portfolio. 387 

aluminous shale, which occur in the Old Red Sandstone, 
and are laid bare in the neighborhood by the sea. The 
waves dash against them, and then roll back turbid with 
the lighter particles, to deposit these in the deep, still 
water outside. But in the place at present occupied by 
the bed the waves could not have deposited them ; it is so 
much exposed to the surf, that the deposit is gradually 
wearing down under the friction, and it must have been 
formed, therefore, at a lower level, and when the sea beat 
against the ancient beaches. We find further proof that 
such must have been the case in a soft stratum of gray, 
shaly sandstone, which rises through the bed, and which 
is thickly perforated by cells of the Pholas candidus, con- 
taining in abundance the dead shells, but which has been 
elevated to a too high place to form any longer a fit habitat 
for the living animals. I had often examined the frag- 
mentary shells of this clayey layer, in the hope of being 
able to elicit from them somewhat regarding the history 
of a deposit older than our present coast line, yet newer 
than our boulder-clay ; but I had hitherto found them in 
every case too comminuted to yield the necessary evi- 
dence. I now succeeded, however, in detecting the same 
deposit under the Northern Sutor, in the same close neigh- 
borhood as on the Cromarty side to the gray aluminous 
shake of the Old Red Sandstone, to which it seems to have 
owed its origin, and abounding in organisms marine and 
terrestrial. All are recent. I found it containing cones 
of our common Scotch fir, hazel-nuts, fragments of alder 
and oak, shells of the common mussel much decomposed, 
and shells, too, of one of the Gaper family {Myce are- 
naria), still lying in pairs. The blue, adhesive clay in 
which they are embedded can scarce be distinguished 
from that of the Lower Lias of Eathie ; the sets of organ- 

29 



338 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

isms in the two deposits are also the same, — indicating 
that their deposition must have taken place under similar 
conditions. The Lias, like the recent clay, has its^ cones, 
its bits of wood, and its marine bivalves lying in pairs; 
and the sole difference that obtains between them is, that 
while the cones, and wood, and bivalves of the blue clay 
are all existences of the present time, the cones, and wood, 
and bivalves of the Lias represent classes of organic beings 
that have long since passed into extinction. This clay- 
bed of the Northern Sutor is one of the best places I know 
for the young geologist taking his first lesson upon. I 
deemed it of interest chiefly as corroborative of the fact 
that our raised beaches on the shores of the Cromarty 
and Moray Friths belong to exactly the present state of 
things ; nay, that for a very inconsiderable period ere 
their elevation, when the blue bed was forming in com- 
paratively deep water, both sea and land were stored with 
their existing productions. 

GLACIAL APPEARANCES AT NIGG AND LOGIE. 

There are two several localities in which, after acquaint- 
ing one's-self with the glacial moraines of Brora, one may 
examine with advantage the glacial moraines of the neigh- 
borhood of Cromarty. One of these we find in the parish 
of Logie, not a hundred yards distant from the great 
coach road; the other, in the parish of Nigg, on one of 
the slopes in which the lofty ridge, whose south-western 
termination forms the northern Sutor, sinks at its north- 
eastern boundary into the plain of Easter Ross. The 
Logie moraine extends, for full three-quarters of a mile, 
in a line parallel to the mountain range from which its 
glacier must have descended. There is a furzy level in 



339 



front, mottled over with groups of cottages ; the moraine, 
— thickly planted with fir, and amid whose sheltering 
hollows the gipsies' tent may be seen in the warmer 
months, and the houseless Free Church congregation at 
this inclement season, — forms a long undulating ridge, 
in what a painter would term the middle ground of the 
landscape ; while on the swelling acclivities behind, over 
which the icy plane must have once extended, we see 
woods, and fields, and stately manor-houses, and, high 
above all, the heathy mountain ridge, where the sky 
seems resting on the land. I have not seen the rock laid 
bare in any part of the cultivated tract which intervenes 
between the moraine and the upland ridge ; but I enter- 
tain little doubt that its surface will be found to bear the 
characteristic groovings and polishings of the glacial period. 
The moraines of the Hill of Nigg, as might be premised 
from the lower elevation and narrower slopes of the em- 
inence from which their glacier descended, are of small 
extent, compared with the moraine of Logie. There is, 
however, one of the number, a beautiful grassy Tomhan, 
fringed at the base with its thickets of dwarf-birch and 
hazel, that was deemed commanding enough in some 
early age, to be selected as the site of a hill-fort, still 
known to tradition as the Danish camp, and whose double 
mound of turf we may still see encircling the summit. It 
must have been a dreary period when the great glacier of 
Logie, sloping towards the south, and the lesser glacier 
of the hill of Nigg, sloping towards the north, saw them- 
selves reflected in the separating strait of sea which at 
this remote period flowed through the flat valley be- 
tween. The valley is still occupied for half its length by 
a sandy estuary, known as the Sands of Nigg, which, ere 
the upheaval of the higher beaches, must have existed as a 



340 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

shallow channel, through which the Frith of Cromarty — • 
then a double-mouthed arm of the sea, with the hill of 
Nigg as a mountainous island in the midst — communi- 
cated with the Moray Frith beyond. 

PHENOMENA EXPLANATORY OF ACCUMULATIONS OF SHELLS. 

There are scarce any of the appearances with which the 
geologist is conversant more mysterious than the immense 
accumulations of shells which he occasionally finds, as in 
some parts of Sweden, separated from all extraneous mat- 
ter, as if they had been subjected to some sifting process, 
— cleaned, as it were, and laid by ; and it has long been 
a question with him how this sifting process had been 
effected. The theory that the accumulation had been 
heaped up by great floods, through which substances of 
the same specific gravity were huddled together, has been 
the commonly accepted one; but who ever saw a flood, 
however great, that did not cast clown its mud and its 
clay among its transported shells, or that had not mingled 
them, in the process of removal, with its lighter gravels or 
its sand? In the flat estuary of Nigg, I have seen the 
sifting process effected through a simple but adequate 
agency. For about two miles from where the estuary 
opens into the Cromarty Frith, its wide tracts of yielding 
sand are thickly occupied by the shells that love such lo- 
calities, — in especial, by the common cockle. Almost 
every tide, when the animals are in season, furnishes its 
vast quantities for the markets of the neighboring towns, 
and still the supply keeps up ample as at first. Now the 
tracts of sand which they inhabit, if not properly quick- 
sands, are at least extremely loose, especially when cov- 
ered by the tide; and though the creatures succeed, so 



a geologist's portfolio. 341 

long as they live, in maintaining their proper place in them 
within a few inches of the surface, no sooner do they die 
than the shells begin gradually to sink downwards through 
the unsolid mass, till, reaching, at the depth of about six 
feet, a firmer stratum, they there accumulate, and form a 
continuous bed. The work of accumulation has been going 
on for many centuries ; generation after generation has 
been dying, to undergo this process of burial, — this pro- 
cess of subarenaceous deposition, if I may so speak ; and 
there are places in the estuary in which the shelly stratum 
has risen to within a foot or two of the surface. It forms 
a sort of quarry of shells ; and when, about thirty years 
ago, there was a lime-work established in the neighbor- 
hood, many thousand cartloads were dug out and burnt 
into lime. I had frequent occasion, some five or six years 
since, to pass through the estuary at seasons when the 
mere amateur would have perhaps staid at home. There 
runs through it a stream of fresh water, that drains the flat 
fields and scattered lochans of Easter Ross ; and on one 
of my winter journeys, after a sudden thaw, accompanied 
by heavy rains, I found the stream swollen to the size of a 
considerable river, and its bed excavated beneath the usual 
level some three or four feet, with the sectional line of 
sand and shells through which it had cut standing up over 
it like a wall. There was first, reckoning downwards, from 
a foot to eighteen inches of pure sand ; and next, from two 
feet to two feet and a half of dead shells. The sandy 
tract all around, for many hundred acres in extent, used 
to be partially covered with water; every furrow of the 
ripples, and every depression of the surface, borrowed its 
full from the receding tide, and, from the general flatness, 
retained it till its return. But on this occasion, the sur- 
face-water had found an unwonted drainage, through the 

29* 



342 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

upright sectional front, into the newly excavated bed of 
the stream. It sank through the upper arenaceous layer 
as through a filtering stone, and then came rushing through 
the stratum of shells underneath, brown with the sand 
which it swept from their interstices. Nor could there be 
a completer sifting process. For yards and roods together 
the shells were as thoroughly divested of the sandy ma- 
trix in which they had lain as if they had been carefully 
washed in a sieve. I was bold enough to infer from the 
phenomenon at the time, that the problem of the unmixed 
accumulation of shells may be, in at least some cases, not 
so difficult of solution as has been hitherto supposed. One 
has but to take for granted conditions such as those of the 
estuary of Nigg, — the incoherent bed, half a quicksand, 
and the subarenaceous deposition, — to account for their 
original production, and the superadded conditions of the 
surface-water and the free drainage, to account for their 
after clearance of extraneous matter. 

CAUTION TO GEOLOGISTS ON THE FINDING OF REMAINS. 

In consolidated slopes it is not unusual to find remains, 
animal and vegetable, of no very remote antiquity. I 
have seen a human skull dug out of the reclining base of 
a clay bank, once a precipice, fully six feet from under the 
surface. It might have been deemed, not without a de- 
gree of plausibility, the skull of some long-lived contem- 
porary of Enoch, — perchance that of one of the accursed 
race, 

" Who sinned and died before the avenging flood." 

Nay, a fine theory was in the act of being formed regard- 
ing it, which affected the whole deposit; but, alas! the 



A geologist's portfolio. 343 

laborer dug a little further, and struck his pickaxe against 
an old Gothic rybat, that lay deeper still. There could be 
no mistaking the character of the champfered edge that 
still bore the marks of the tool, nor that of the square per- 
foration for the lock-bolt ; and the rising theory straight- 
way stumbled against it and fell. Both rybat and skull 
had come from an ancient burying-ground, situated on a 
projecting angle of the table, and above. 

REMARKS ON UNDERLYING CLAY ON LEVEL MOORS. 

On level moors, where the rain-water stagnates in pools, 
and a thin layer of mossy soil produces a scanty covering 
of heath, we find the underlying clay streaked and spotted 
with patches of white. As in the spots and streaks of the 
Red Sandstone formations, Old and New, the coloring 
matter has been discharged without any accompanying 
change having taken place in the mechanical structure of 
the substance which it pervaded; for we find the same 
mixture of arenaceous and aluminous particles in the white 
as in the red portions. And the stagnant water above, 
acidulated, perhaps, by its various vegetable solutions, 
seems to have been in some way connected with these ap- 
pearances. In almost every case in which a crack through 
the clay gives access to the oozing moisture, we find the 
sides bleached, for several feet downwards, to nearly the 
color of pipe-clay; we find the surface, too, when divested 
of the soil, presenting for yards together the appearance 
of sheets of half-bleached linen. Now, the peculiar chem- 
istry through which these changes are effected might be 
found to throw much light on similar phenomena in the 
older formations. There are quarries in the New Red 
Sandstone in which almost every mass of stone presents 



344 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

a different shade of color from that of its neighboring 
mass, .and quarries in the Old Red, whose strata we find 
streaked and spotted like pieces of calico. And their 
variegated aspect seems to have been communicated in 
every instance, not during deposition, nor after they had 
been hardened into stone, but when, like the boulder-clay, 
they had existed in an intermediate state. 

TRAVELLED BOULDERS NOT ASSOCIATED WITH CLAY. 

All the travelled boulders of the north do not seem asso- 
ciated with the clay. We find them occurring, in some in- 
stances, in an overlying gravel, and in some instances rest- 
ing at high levels on the bare rock. I have seen, on the 
hill of Fyrish, — a lofty eminence of the Lower Old Red 
which overlooks the upper part of the Cromarty Frith, — a 
boulder of an exceedingly beautiful, sparkling hornblende, 
reposing on a stratum of yellow sandstone, fully a thousand 
feet over the sea, where there is not a particle of the clay 
in sight. We find these travellers furnishing specimens of 
almost all the primary rocks of the country, — its gneisses, 
schistose and granitic, its granites, red, white, and gray, 
its hornblendic and micaceous schists, and occasionally, 
though more rarely, its traps. The stone most abundant 
among them, and which is found occurring in the largest 
masses, is a well-marked granitic gneiss, in which the 
quartz is white, and the feldspar of a pink color, and in 
which the mica, intensely black, exists in oblong accumu- 
lations, ranged along the line of stratification in inter- 
rupted layers. No rock of the same kind is to be found 
in situ nearer than thirty miles. We find granitic boul- 
ders of vast size abundant in the neighborhood of Tain, 
especially where the coach-road passes towards the west 



A geologist's portfolio. 345 

through a piece of barren moor, and on the range of sea- 
beach below. One enormous block, of a form somewhat 
approaching the cubical, is large enough, and seems solid 
enough, to admit of being hewn into the pedestal of some 
colossal statue ; but instead of being thus appropriated to 
form part of a monument, it has lately been converted of 
itself into a whole monument. When I last passed the 
way, I found it dedicated, in an inscription of nine-inch 
letters, " to the memory of the immortal Scott." Nature 
had dedicated it to the memory of one of her great revo- 
lutions ages before; but since the dedicator had deter- 
mined on adding, in Highland fashion, a stone to the cairn 
of Sir Walter, it would certainly have been no easy mat- 
ter to have added to it a nobler one. 

GRANITIC GNEISS AND SANDSTONE, WITH THE CONDITIONS OF 
THEIR UPHEAVAL. 

On entering on the granitic rock, we find the strata, 
strangely disturbed and contorted, lying, in the course of 
a few yards, in almost every angle, and dipping in almost 
every direction. And not only must there have been a 
complexity of character in the disturbing forces, but the 
rock on which they acted must have been singularly sus- 
ceptible of being disturbed. The strata of the sandstone 
were, at the period of their upheaval, the same brittle, 
rigid plates of solid stone that they are now. The strata 
of the granitic gneiss were characterized, on the contrary, 
during their earlier periods of disturbance, by a yielding 
flexibility. They were capable of being bent into ^harp 
angles without breaking. We see them running in zig- 
zag lines along the precipices, now striking downwards, 
now ascending upwards, now curved, like a relaxed Indian 
bow, in one direction, now curved in a contrary one, like 



346 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

the same bow when fully bent. The strata, of the sand- 
stone, like a pile of glass-panes laid parallel, existed in a 
state in which they could be either raised in any given 
angle, or, if the acting forces were violent and partial, 
broken up and shivered ; whereas the granitic strata ex- 
isted in the state of the same glass-panes brought to a 
bright red heat, and capable, from their extreme flexi- 
bility, of being bent and twisted in any direction. We 
find, too, that there occur occasional patches in which the 
lines of the stratification have been together obliterated. 
We can trace the strata with much distinctness on every 
side of these ; but there is a gradual obscuration of the 
lines, and we see what was a granitic gneiss in one square 
yard of rock existing as a compact homogeneous mass in 
the next. The effect is exactly that which would be pro- 
duced in the heated panes of my illustration, were the 
heat kept up until portions of them began to run ; and 
the circumstance serves to throw light on some of the 
other phenomena of the gneiss. The stone, in its average 
specimens, is a ternary, consisting of red feldspar, white 
quartz, and a dingy-colored mica; but no one, notwith- 
standing, could mistake it for a true granite. It has its 
granite veins, however; and these veins, truly such in 
some cases, are, in not a few others, mere strata of the 
gneiss, which have evidently been formed into granite 
where they lie. There are no marks of injection, — no 
accompanying disturbance. All their conditions, with the 
exception of their being true granites, are exactly those 
of the layers which repose over and under them. Now, 
the homogeneous patches serve, as I have said, to throw 
light on the secret of the formation of these. In one im- 
portant respect the granitic rocks differ widely among 
themselves. Some of them contain potass and soda in 



a geologist's portfolio. 347 

such large proportions, and have such a tendency to dis- 
integrate, in consequence, that they furnish much less 
durable materials for building than the better sandstones ; 
while others, of an almost indestructible quality, are devoid 
of these salts altogether. Potass and soda form powerful 
fluxes ; and it seems at least natural to infer that, should 
wide tracts of granitic rock be exposed to an intense but 
equable heat, the portions of the mass in which the fluxes 
exist in large proportions must pass into a much higher 
state of fluidity than the portions in which they are less 
abundant, or which are altogether devoid of them. Single 
strata and detached masses might thus come to be in the 
state of extremest fusion of which their substance was 
capable, and all their particles, disengaged, might be enter- 
ing freely into the combinations peculiar to the plutonic 
rocks, when all around them continued to bear the semi- 
chemical, semi-mechanical characteristics of the metamor- 
phic ones. Hence it is possibly the origin of some of 
those granite veins, open above, and terminating below in 
wedge-like points, which have so puzzled the Huttonians 
of a former age, and which have been so triumphantly 
referred to by their opponents as evidences that the granite 
had been precipitated by some aqueous solution. 

SEPTARIA, OR CEMENT-STONES OF THE LIAS. 

Observe these nodular masses of pale, blue limestone, 
that seem as if they had cracked in some drying process, 
and had afterwards the cracks carefully filled up with a 
light-colored cement. The flaws are occupied by a rich 
calcareous spar; and in the centre of each mass we find, 
in most instances, a large ill-preserved Ammonite, Avhich 
has also its spar-filled cracks and fissures, as if it, too, had 



S48 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

been burst asunder by the process which had rent the sur- 
rounding matrix. These nodular masses are the charac- 
teristic septaria or cementstones of the Lias, so much 
used in England for making a hard, enduring mortar, that 
has the quality of setting under water. Their bluish-col- 
ored portions are so largely charged with the argillaceous 
matter of the bed in which they occur, and contain, be- 
sides, so considerable a mixture of iron, that, refusing to 
slake like common lime, they have to be crushed, after 
calcination, by mechanical means ; while the fossil in the 
centre, and the semi-transparent spar of the cracks, are 
composed of matter purely calcareous. And from this 
peculiar mixture the cement seems to derive those setting 
qualities which render it of such value. 

AMMONITES OF THE NORTHERN LIAS. 

The Ammonites of the upper beds of the Lias approach 
more to the type of the Ammonite communis, being com- 
paratively flat when viewed sectionally, and having the 
whorls broadly visible, as in the Ionic volute ; while the 
Ammonites of the lower beds approach in type to the Am- 
monite heterophyllits, — each succeeding whorl covering so 
largely the whorl immediately under it, that the spiral line 
seems restricted to a minute hollow in the centre, scarce 
equal in extent, in some specimens, to the twentieth part 
of the entire area. In other words, the Ammonites of the 
Upper Lias in this deposit represent, as a group, the true 
ammonite type; while in the Lower Lias they approach 
more nearly, as a group, to the type of the nautilus. And 
not only are they massier in form, but also absolutely larger 
in size. I have found Ammonites in the more ponderous 
septaria, that fully doubled in bulk any I ever saw in the 



a geologist's portfolio. 349 

upper shales. We occasionally find nodules that, having 
formed in the outer rings of these larger shells, somewhat 
resemble the rims of wheels, — in some cases, wheels of 
not very diminutive size. 

BELEMNITES OF THE NORTHERN LIAS. 

We find the Belemnites of the lower deposit, like its 
Ammonites, of a bulkier form than those of the upper 
beds. The Belemnites abbreviatus and elongatus, both 
large, massy species, especially the former, are of common 
occurrence ; while those most abundant in the upper beds 
are the Belemnites longissimus and penicillatus, both ex- 
ceedingly slim species. It is worthy of remark, that Sir 
R. Murchison, in his list of fossils peculiar to the Lias as 
developed in the midland counties of England, specifies 
the Belemnites penicillatus as characteristic of its upper, 
and the Belemnites abbreviatus and elongatus of its lower 
division. 

CUTTLE-FISH. 

Is the reader acquainted with at once the largest and 
most curious of British Mollusca, — the cuttle-fish, — a 
creature which stands confessedly at the head of the great 
natural division to which it belongs? Independently of 
its intrinsic interest to the naturalist, it bears for the com- 
mentator and the man of letters an interest of an extrinsic 
and reflected kind. No other mollusc occupies so prom- 
inent a place in our literature. It is furnished with an 
ink-bag, from which, when pursued by an enemy, it ejects 
a dingy carbonaceous fluid, that darkens the water for 
yards around, and then escapes in the cloud, — like some 
Homeric hero worsted by his antagonist, but favored by 

30 



350 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

the gods, or some body of military retreating unseen from 
a lost field, under the cover of a smoking shot. And 
there has scarce arisen a controversy since the days of 
Cicero, in which the cuttle-fish, with its ink-bag, has not 
furnished some one of the controversialists with an illus- 
tration. It has attained to some celebrity, too, on another 
and altogether different account. That enormous mon- 
ster the kraken of Norway, of which our earlier geogra- 
phers tell such surprising stories, was held to belong to 
this curious family. And though the monster has disap- 
peared from the treatises of our naturalists for a full half- 
century, and from the pages of even our most credulous 
voyagers for at least a century more, it maintained its 
place as a real existence long enough to be assigned a per- 
manent niche in our literature. It has been described as 
raising its vast arms out of the water to the height of tall 
forest-trees, and as stretching its knobbed and warted 
bulk, roughened with shells, and darkened with sea-weed, 
for roods and furlongs together, — resembling nothing less 
extensive than some range of rocky skerries on some dan- 
gerous coast, or some long chain of sand banks, forming 
the bar of some great river. It was introduced to the 
reading world with much circumstantiality of detail, by an 
old Norwegian bishop (Eric Pontappiclon), as "an animal 
the largest in creation, whose body rises above the surface 
of the water like a mountain, and its arms like the masts 
of ships." And one of the French continuators of Buffon, 
— Denys Montfort, — regarding it as at least a possible 
existence, has given, in his history of Mollusca, a print of 
a colossal cuttle-fish hanging at the gunwale of a ship, 
and twisting its immense arms about the masts and rig- 
ging, — a feat which the cuttle-fish of the Indian seas is 
said sometimes to accomplish, if not with a ship, at least 



351 



with a canoe. But nowhere does the kraken of Norway 
look half so imposing or half so poetical as in Milton. In 
palpable reference to the old bishop's "largest animal in 
creation," we find the poet describing, in one of his finest 
similes, — 

" That sea-beast, 
Leviathan, which God of all his works 
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream : 
Him, haply slumb'ring on the Norway foam, v 
The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff, 
Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell, 
With fixed anchor in his scaly rind 
Moors by his side under the lee, while night 
Invests the sea, and wished morn delays." 

The existing cuttle-fish of our seas, though vastly less 
imposing in its proportions than the kraken of Norway, is, 
as I have said, a very curious animal, — constituting, as it 
does, that highest link among Mollusca, in which creatures 
without a true back-bone or a true brain approach nearest, 
in completeness of structure and the sagacity of their 
instincts, to the vertebrata. All my readers on the sea- 
coast, especially such of them as live near sandy bays, or 
in the neighborhood of salmon-fishings, must have fre- 
quently seen the species most abundant in our seas, — the 
common loligo or strollach {Loligo vulgaris)/ and almost 
all of them must have the recollection of having regarded 
it, when they first stumbled upon it in some solitary walk, 
as an extraordinary monster, worthy of the first place in a 
museum. "The cuttle-fish," says Kirby, in his Bridge water 
Treatise, "is one of the most wonderful works of the Cre- 
ator." We have no creature at all approaching it in size, 
that departs so widely from the familiar, every-day type 
of animal life, whether developed on the land or in the 
water. 



352 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

A man buried to the neck in a sack, and prepared for 
such a race as Tennent describes in his " Anster Fair," is 
an exceedingly strange-looking animal, but not half so 
strange-looking as a strollach. Let us just try to improve 
him into one, and give, in this way, some idea of the ani- 
mal to those unacquainted with it. First, then, the sack 
must be brought to a j>oint at the bottom, as if the legs 
were sewed up tightly together, and the corners left pro- 
jecting so as to form two flabby fins; and further, the sack 
must be a sack of pink, thickly speckled with red, and tol- 
erably open at the other end, where the neck and head 
protrude. So much for the changes on the sack ; but the 
changes on the parts that rise out of the sack must be of 
a much more extraordinary character. We must first ob- 
literate the face, and then, fixing on the crown of the head 
a large beak of black horn, crooked as that of the parrot, 
we must remove the mouth to the opening between the 
mandibles. Around the broad base of the beak must we 
insert a circular ring of brain, as if this part of the animal 
had no other vocation than to take care of the mouth and 
its pertinents; and around the circular brain must we 
plant, as if on the coronal ring of the head, no fewer than 
ten long arms, each furnished with double rows of concave 
suckers, that resemble cups arranged on the plane of a nar- 
row table. The tout ensemble must serve to remind one 
of the head of some Indian chief bearing a crown of tall 
feathers; and directly below the crown, where the cheeks, 
or rather the ears, had been, we must fix two immense 
eyes, huge enough to occupy what had been the whole 
sides of the face. Though the brain of an ordinary-sized 
loligo be scarcely larger than a ring for the little finger, its 
eyes are scarcely smaller than those of an ox. To com- 
plete our cuttle-fish, we must insist, as a condition, that, 



353 



when in motion, the metamorphosed sack-racer mnst either 
walk head downwards on his arms, or glide, like a boy de- 
scending an inclined plane on ice, feet foremost, with the 
point of his sack first, and his beak and arms last ; or, in 
other words, that, reversing every ordinary circumstance, 
of voluntary motion, he must make a snout or cut-water 
of his feet, and a long trailing tail of his arms and head. 
The cuttle-fish, when walking, always walks with its mouth 
nearer the earth than any other part of either head or 
body, and when swimming, always follows its tail, instead 
of being followed by it. 

This last curious condition, though doubtless, on the 
whole, the best adapted to the conformation and instincts 
of the creature, often proves fatal to it, especially in calm 
weather and quiet inland friths, when not a ripple breaks 
upon the shore, to warn that the shore is near. An enemy 
appears; the creature ejects its cloud of ink, like a sharp- 
shooter discharging his rifle ere he retreats ; and then, 
darting away tail foremost under the cover, it grounds 
itself high upon the beach, and perishes there. Few men 
have walked much along the shores of a sheltered bay 
without witnessing a catastrophe of this kind. The last 
loligo I saw strand itself in this way, was a large and very 
vigorous animal. The day was extremely calm; I heard 
a peculiar sound, — a squelch, if I may employ such a 
word, — and there, a few yards away, was a loligo nearly 
two feet in length, high and dry upon the pebbles. I laid 
hold of it by the sheath or sack ; and the loligo, in turn, 
laid hold of the pebbles, just as I have seen a boy, when 
borne off against his will by a stronger than himself, grasp- 
ing fast to projecting door-posts and furniture. The peb- 
bles were hard, smooth, and heavy, but the creature raised 
them with ease, by*twining its flexible arms around them, 



354 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

and then forming a vacuum in each of its suckers. I sub- 
jected one of my hands to its grasp, and it seized fast hold ; 
but though the suckers were still employed, it employed 
them on a different principle. Around the circular rim of 
each there is a fringe of minute thorns, hooked somewhat 
like those of the wild rose. In fastening on the hard 
smooth pebbles, these were overtopped by a fleshy mem- 
brane, much in the manner that the cushions of a cat's 
paw overtop its claws, when the animal is in a state of 
tranquillity; and, by means of the projecting membrane, 
the hollow inside was rendered air-tight, and the vacuum 
completed ; but in dealing with the hand, a soft substance, 
the thorns were laid bare, like the claws of the cat when 
stretched out in anger, and at least a thousand minute 
prickles were fixed in the skin at once. They failed to 
penetrate it, for they were short, and individually not 
strong, but acting together and by hundreds, they took 
at least a very firm hold. 

What follows the reader may deem barbarous; but the 
men who gulp down at a sitting half a hundred live oys- 
ters, to gratify their taste, will surely forgive me the de- 
struction of a single mollusc to gratify my curiosity. I cut 
open the sack of the creature with a sharp penknife, and 
laid bare the viscera. What a sight for Ilervey when 
prosecuting, in the earlier stages, his grand discovery of 
the circulation ! There, in the centre, was the yelloio mus- 
cular heart propelling into the transparent tubular arteries 
the yelloio blood. Beat — beat — beat; — I could seethe 
whole as in a glass model; and all I lacked were powers 
of vision nice enough to enable me to detect the fluid pas- 
sing through the minuter arterial branches, and then re- 
turning by the veins to the two other hearts of the crea- 
ture ; for, strange to say, it is furnished with three. There 



a geologist's portfolio. 855 

is the yellow heart at the centre, and, lying altogether de- 
tached from it, two other darker-colored hearts at the 
sides ! I cut a little deeper. There was the gizzard-like 
stomach, filled with fragments of minute mussel and crab- 
shells ; and there, inserted in the spongy, conical, yellow- 
ish-colored liver, and somewhat resembling in form a Flor- 
ence flask, the ink-bag distended, with its deep dark sepia, 
— the identical pigment sold under that name in our color- 
shops, and so extensively used in landscape-drawing by 
the limner. I once saw a pool of water, within the cham- 
ber of a salmon-wear, darkened by this substance almost 
to the consistence of ink. Where the bottom was laid 
dry, some fifteen or twenty cuttle-fish lay dead, some of 
them green, some blue, some yellow; for it is one of the 
characteristics of the creature that, in passing into a state 
of decomposition, it assumes a succession of brilliant col- 
ors ; but at one of the sides of the chamber, where there 
was a shallow pool, six or eight individuals, the sole sur- 
vivors of the shoal, still retained their original pink tint, 
freckled with red, and went darting about in panic terror 
within their narrow confines, emitting ink at almost every 
dart, until the whole pool had become a deep solution of 
sepia. But I digress. 

I next laid open the huge eyes of the stranded cuttle- 
fish. They were curious organs, — more simple in their 
structure than those of any quadruped, or even any fish, 
with which I am acquainted, but well adapted, I doubt 
not, for the purpose of seeing. A camera-obscura may be 
described as consisting of two parts, — a lens in front, and 
a darkened chamber behind ; but in both the brute and 
human eye we find a third part added ; there is a lens in 
the middle, a darkened chamber behind, and a lighted 
chamber, or rather vestibule, in front. Now this lighted 



356 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

vestibule — the cornea — is wanting in the eye of the cut- 
tle-fish. The lens is placed in front, and the darkened 
chamber behind ; the construction of the organ is that of 
a common camera-obscura, without aught additional. I 
found something worthy of remark, too, in the peculiar 
style in which the chamber is darkened. In the higher 
animals it may be described as a chamber hung with black 
velvet ; the pigmentum nigrum which covers it is of deep- 
est black ; but in the cuttle-fish it is a chamber hung 
with velvet, not of a black, but of a dark purple hue ; the 
pigmentum nigrum is of a purplish-red color. There is 
something curious in marking this, as it were, first de- 
parture from an invariable condition of eyes of the more 
perfect structure, and in them tracing the peculiarity down- 
wards through almost every shade of color, to the emerald- 
like eye-specks of the pecten, and the still more rudimental 
red eye-specks of the star-fish. After examining the eyes, 
I next laid open, in all its length, from the neck to the 
point of the sack, the dorsal bone of the creature, — its 
internal shell, I should rather say, for bone it has none. 
The form of the shell in this species is that of a feather 
equally developed in the web on both sides. It gives 
rigidity to the body, and furnishes the muscles with a ful- 
crum; and we find it composed, like all other shells, of a 
mixture of animal matter and carbonate of lime. In some 
of the genera it is much more complicated and rigid than 
in that to which the strollach belongs, consisting, instead 
of one, of numerous plates, and in form somewhat resem- 
bling a flat shallop with its cargo rising over the gunwale, 
or one of the valves of a pearl mussel occupied by the 
animal. Is my description of this curious creature too 
lengthy ? The young geologist who sets himself to study 
the fossils of the Oolitic and Cretaceous systems would be 



A GEOLOGIST'S PORTFOLIO. 357 

all the better for knowing a great deal more regarding it 
than I have told him here. He will discover that at least 
one-half the molluscous remains of these deposits, their 
belemnites, ammonites, nautili, nummulites, baculites, ha- 
mites, lituites, turrilites, and scaphites, belonged to the 
great natural class — singularly rich in its extinct orders 
and genera, though comparatively poor in its existing 
ones — which we find represented by the cuttle-fish. 

CONGENERS OF THE CUTTLE-FISH, BELEMNITES, ETC. 

Among its many extinct congeners, the order of the 
Belemnites was one of not the least curious. It has been 
remarked, that in the cuttle-fish, as we now find it, a 
greater number of distinct portions of the organization of 
creatures, belonging to widely-separated divisions of the 
animal kingdom, are to be seen united than in any other 
animal. Cut off its head immediately below the arms, and 
we have in the dissevered portion, with its ring of nerve, 
its central mouth, and its suckers, the true analogue of a 
star-fish. The radiated zoophite lies before us. Some of 
its genera have their plated and jointed antennas placed 
above and below the eyes. The creature, so for as these 
organs give it a character, is no longer a zoophite, but an 
insect or crustacean. But then there is the soft sac, with 
its fin-like appendages, the internal shell, and the yellow 
transparent blood. These are unequivocal characteristics 
of the mollusc. Yes ; but then there is a horny beak, and 
there a muscular gizzard. It must have laid the bird under 
contribution for these. There is, besides, a true tongue, 
and an organ for hearing ; and, though one of the cham- 
bers be awanting, a singularly large and efficient eye. 
These organs are all borrowed from the vertebrata. And 



600 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

— as if to secure its claim to originality, not only in its 
combinations, but in its parts — there are its three hearts, 
and its well-stored ink-bag, — chattels that it could scarce 
have borrowed anywhere. It occupies, according to Cu- 
vier, a sort of central place in the animal kingdom, where 
roads from all the various divisions converge, and the three 
hearts and the ink-bag mark, as it were, the point at which 
they meet. Extensive and wonderful, however, as its 
combination of parts may seem, its extinct congener, the 
Belemnite, added to the number at least one part more. 
Like that curious gelatinous zoophite, the Dutch man-of- 
war (JPhysalia), it was furnished with a sailing apparatus. 
Not only could it swim tail foremost, and walk head down- 
wards, like our existing cuttle-fish, but it could also raise 
itself to the surface of the water, and there, spreading out 
its sail of thin membrane, speed gaily away before the 
wind. Several of the existing congeners of the creature, 
such as the Argonauta Argo, are sailors still ; but unlike 
the Belemnite, or its analogue, the cuttle-fish, they are 
furnished with external shells. They are sailors each in 
its own little boat, whereas the Belemnite was a sailor 
without a boat, — such a sailor as Franklin was, when, lay- 
ing himself at full length in the water, he laid hold of the 
string of an elevated kite during a smart breeze, and, with- 
out effort on his own part, was drawn across a small lake 
by the impulsion of the wind above. 

I have full in my view where I write, a shelf occupied 
with ranges of our Scotch Belemnites of the Lias, placed 
on end, and leaning against the wall, like muskets in an 
armory. A second shelf exhibits ranges of our Scotch 
Belemnites of the Oolite. Ere adverting, however, to 
their specific differences, — differences which their mode of 
arrangement renders apparent at a glance, — let me select 



a geologist's portfolio. 359 

for description an average specimen, as a type of the 
order. Here, then, is the Belemnite elongatus, from the 
Upper Lias of Eathie. The architect gives the propor- 
tions of his columns by a scale of diameters. The height 
of the Tuscan column is equal to seven, that of the Doric 
to eight, that of the Ionic to nine, and that of the Corin- 
thian to ten diameters. In describing the proportions of 
the Belemnite, I shall borrow a hint from the architect, 
by making my scale one of diameter also ; fixing my 
calipers, not at the base of the shaft, but one-fourth of its 
entire length up. Let the reader imagine a small cylin- 
drical column of brown polished stone, diminishing from 
the base upwards for three-fourths of its height much in 
the same proportions as one of the Grecian columns 
diminishes, and \ then in the remaining fourth suddenly 
sweeping to a point. Its length — eight inches in the 
present instance — is equal, like that of a Corinthian 
shaft, to ten of its diameters. Within this solid column 
we find an internal cone rising from the common base, the 
whole of which it occupies, and terminating in the apex, 
at about one-third the height of the whole. It is dif- 
ferent in color and structure from the brown pointed 
shaft at which it is included. The shaft or column shows 
as if it had been formed, like a dipped candle, by repeated 
accessions to its outer surface ; whereas the internal cone 
shows that it has been formed by accessions to its base. 
The shaft seems to have grown as a tree grows, and ex- 
hibits its internal concentric rings crossed by lines radi- 
ating from the centre, just as the yearly rings of the tree 
are crossed by the medullary rays. The internal cone, on 
the contrary, was reared course after course, as a pyramid 
is built of ashlar, — with this difference, however, that it 
was the terminal course of the apex, that was laid first, 



360 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

and that every succeeding course was added to the base. 
The entire Belemnite was originally of greater length than 
the specimen before us indicates; for the cone extended 
very considerably beyond the base of the column, and 
beyond the cone there was a still farther prolongation of a 
kind of horny sheath, composed of the internal shell of 
an extinct order of cuttle-fish, its substitute for a verte- 
brate column; just as the existing loligo has its thin elastic 
pen, and the existing sepia its stifFer and more complex 
bundle of calcareous plates. There are English speci- 
mens, in which the characteristic ink-bag may still be 
found resting on the base of the internal cone, giving 
evidence at once of the class of animals to which the 
fossil belonged, and that the column and cone must have 
been internal, not external, shells. Nature, though liberal 
to all her creatures, is no spendthrift. We find that to 
her naked Cephalopoda, such as the strollach and the 
sepia, she gives in the ink-bag an ability of hiding them- 
selves in sudden darkness ; but that to the shelled crea- 
tures of their class, such as the nautilus, she gives no ink- 
bag. For them the protecting shell is sufficient. The 
ink-bag of the Belemnite at once shows that it was a 
cuttle-fish, and that it was naked. Here, in a specimen 
from the Whitby Lias, we may see the bag still charged 
with its ink; and so slight is the change induced by un- 
told centuries, in the nature of the carbonaceous substance 
which composed the latter, that, after having scraped it 
down, and diluted it with water, we may still use it as a 
pigment. We find it stated by Buckland, that the tinting 
of a drawing made with fossil ink at his request, by his 
friend Francis Chantrey, was pronounced by a celebrated 
painter, unacquainted with the secret of its origin, as pecu- 
liarly agreeable and well-toned. 



a geologist's portfolio. 3G1 

But the Belemnite, with its horny prolongation, was 
not merely a sort of stiffener introduced into the body of 
the creature to give it rigidity, — as the seamstress intro- 
duces, for a similar purpose, bits of wire and whalebone 
into her pieces of dress, or as the pen exists in the strol- 
lach : the stony column, and its internal cone, constituted, 
besides, the sailing organs of the creature, — the cone 
forming its floating apparatus, and the column its ballast. 
The cone, as I have said, consists of a number of layers, 
ranged parallel to its base, like courses of ashlar in a pyra- 
mid. "We find each layer, when detached, exactly resem- 
bling a thick patent watch-glass, concave on its under, 
convex on its upper, surface. ISTow, each of these formed, 
in its original state, not a solid mass, but a hollow, thinly 
partitioned chamber or story ; and, perforating the entire 
range of stories from apex to base, there was a cylindrical 
pipe, just as the reader must have seen the cylindrical 
case of a turnpike stair passing upwards through the 
stories of some ancient tower from bottom to top. And 
this pipe was the siphuncle or pump through which the 
creature regulated its specific gravity, and sank to the 
bottom or rose to the surface, just as it willed. Mr. J. S. 
Miller, well known for his labors among the Crinoidea, 
mentions, in his paper on Belemnites, an interesting ex- 
periment with regard to the cone. He extracted it care- 
fully from one of his specimens, and then inserting in the 
hollow of the stony column which it had occupied, a cone 
of oiled paper filled with cotton, he placed the specimen 
in Water, and found the buoyancy of the cone compensat- 
ing so completely for the density of the column, that the 
whole floated. Now, to demonstrate the use of the bal- 
lasting column, let us imagine a sail raised over the cone, 
and the whole sent to sea in a high wind. Has the reader 

31 



362 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

ever sailed, when a boy, his mimic ship, and does he 
remember how imperative it was that there should be lead 
on the keel ? The stony column is the lead here ; and 
from the form of the creature, as indicated in the entirer 
specimens, some such internal ballasting seems to have 
been as essential to preserve its upright position as the 
lead is to the boy's ship. There are, however, but few of 
our naturalists who believe with Mr. J. S. Miller, that the 
column was originally the dense and solid body it is now. 
Lamarck held that, like the bone of the existing sepia, it 
was of " a spongy and cellular texture ; " Parkinson, that 
it was "porous or cork-like;" and Buckland, that "the 
idea of its having been heavy, solid, and stony, while it 
formed part of a living and floating sepia, is contrary to 
all analogy." With an eye to the question, I have suc- 
ceeded in collecting a number of specimens, which, when 
in their recent state, had been crushed or broken ; and I 
am disposed to hold, from the appearance of the fractures 
in every case, that, notwithstanding the authorities arrayed 
against him, Miller's view is the right one. The stony 
column, though it must have been somewhat less brittle 
in its recent than in its fossil state, — for it contained its 
numerous thin plates of horn, tenacious, as is natural to 
the substance, in a considerable degree, — was yet brittle 
enough to break across at very low angles, and to exhibit 
on the side to which the force had been applied, its yawn- 
ing cracks and fissures, though on the opposite side the 
wrinkled surface generally indicates a tag of adhesion. In 
the cases, too, in which the Belemnite had been broken 
into fragments, I have found every detached portion pre- 
senting its hard, sharp angles, and existing as a brittle 
calcareous body, however soft and chalky the condition 
of the more delicate shells of the deposit in which it 



A geologist's portfolio. 363 

occurred. Nor do I know that analogy is very directly 
opposed to the supposition that the column might have 
existed in the creature in its stony state. If two solid 
calcareous substances, quite as hard and dense as any 
fossil Belemnite, exist within the head of the recent cod 
and haddock, why might not one solid calcareous sub- 
stance have existed within the body of an extinct order 
of cuttle-fish ? * 

I have found considerable difficulty in classing accord- 
ing to their species, the Belemnites of the Lias. I soon 
exhausted the species enumerated as peculiar to the for- 
mation by Miller, and found a great many others. They 
divide naturally into two well-marked families, — the 
specimens of a numerous family, that, like the Belemnite 
elongatus, are broadest at the base, and diminish as they 
approach the apex, — while the specimens of a family con- 
siderably less numerous, like the Belemnite fusiformis, 
resemble spear-heads, in being broadest near the middle, 
and in diminishing toward both ends. In subdividing 
these great families, various principles of classification 
have been adopted. There are grooves, single in some 
species, double, and even triple, in others ; extending 
from the apex downwards in some — extending from the 
base upwards in others ; and these have been regarded by 
Phillips — the geologist who has most thoroughly studied 
the subject — as constituting valuable characteristics not 
only of species, but of genera and formations. Miller 
took into account, as principles of classification, not only 
the general form, but even the comparative transparency 
or opacity, of the column, — marks selected in accordance 
with the belief that the column was originally the solid 
substance it is now. The order furnishes, doubtless, its 
various marks of specific arrangement. I have even found 



364 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCEIES FHOM 

the hint borrowed from the architect, of taking the pro* 
portions of species by their diameters, not without its 
value. In measuring, for instance, four well-preserved 
specimens of the Belemnite abbreviatus, one of the bulk- 
iest which occurs in our Scotch Lias, and whose average 
length is six inches, I found that two of the four contained 
5| diameters, one 5\ diameters, and one 5f diameters; 
while another bulky Belemnite of the Scotch Oolite, not 
yet named apparently, whose average length is 3J inches, 
contains only 3| diameters, and strikes at once as specific- 
ally different from the others. Equally striking is the 
specific difference of the Belemnite elongatus, which con- 
tains from nine to ten diameters, — of another nameless 
species which contains from twelve to thirteen diameters, 
— of another which contains from fifteen to sixteen diam- 
eters, — of another, agreeing in its proportions with the 
Belemnite longissimus of Miller, which contains from 
eighteen to twenty diameters, — of another which con- 
tains from twenty-three to twenty-four diameters, — and 
of yet another, long and slender as a heckle-pin, which 
contains from thirty to thirty-two diameters. My rule of 
classification must of course be regarded as merely a sub- 
sidiary one. There are species which it does not distin- 
guish. It does not distinguish, for instance the Belemijite 
sulcatus of our Scotch Lias, whose average length is six 
inches, from the Belemnite elongatus, whose average 
length is eight. Both agree in containing from nine to 
ten diameters, though in form and appearance they are 
strikingly different, — the adjuncatus being much more 
pointed at the apex than the other, much more finely pol- 
ished on the surface, and furnished with a deeper groove. 
As a subsidiary rule, however, I have found the rule of 
the diameters a useful one. It has enabled me to form a 



a geologist's portfolio. 365 

numerous and discordant assemblage of specimens into 
distinct groups, the specific identity of which, when thus 
collected, is at once verified by the eye. 

But the reader, unless very thoroughly a geological one, 
must be of opinion that I have said quite enough about 
the Belemnite. I may, however, venture to add further, 
that its place in the geological scale is not without its in- 
terest. The periods of the more ancient formations, from 
the older Silurian to the older New Red Sandstone inclu- 
sive, had all passed away ere the order was called into ex- 
istence. It then sprung into being nearly contemporane- 
ously with the bird and the reptile ; and, after existing by 
myriads during the Oolitic and Cretaceous periods, passed 
into extinction when the ocean of the Chalk had ceased 
to exist, and just as quadrupeds of the higher order were 
on the eve of appearing on the stage, but had not yet ap- 
peared. Since the period in which it lived, though geo- 
logically modern, the surface of the earth must have wit- 
nessed many strange revolutions. There have been Bel- 
emnites dug out of the sides of the Himalaya mountains, 
seventeen thousand feet above the level of the sea. 

COPEOLITES OF THE LIAS. 

Large coprolites of peculiar appearance, some of them 
charged with fish-scales of the ganoid order, are tolerably 
abundant ; and they belonged, I have little doubt, to sau- 
rians. When bringing home with me, many years since, a 
well-marked specimen, I overtook by the way an acquaint- 
ance who had passed a considerable part of his life in 
Dutch Guiana. The thought did not at first occur to me 
of submitting to him my specimen. As we walked on to- 
gether, he thrust his hand into his pocket to bring out his 

Si* 



366 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

handkerchief, and brought out, instead, a large mass of 
damaged snuff. "Ah," he exclaimed, " that roguish boy ! 
I was standing with my neighbor, the shopkeeper, this 
morning, when he was opening up a cask of snuff that 
had got spoiled with sea-water ; and his boy, seeing my 
pocket provokingly open I suppose, must have dropped in 
this huge lump ! The joke seems a small one," he contin- 
ued, "but it must be at least rather a natural one. The 
only other trick of the kind ever played me was by a 
South American Indian, on the banks of the Demerara: 
he dropped, unseen, into the pocket of my light nankeen 
jacket a piece of sun-baked alligator's dung." " What 
sort of a looking substance was it?" I asked, uncovering 
my specimen, and submitting it to his examination; "was 
it at all like that ? " " Not at all unlike," was the reply ; 
" it bore an exactly similar pale yellow tint, as if, like the 
dung of our sea-birds that swallow and digest fish-bones, 
it contained abundance of lime ; and it was sprinkled 
over, in the same way, with the glittering enamelled scales 
of that curious fish the bony pike, so common, as you are 
aware, in our South American rivers." 

INTRUSIVE DIKES OF EATHIE. 

There are appearances in connection with the Lias of 
Eathie which seem well suited to puzzle the geologist, and 
which have, in fact, already puzzled geologists not a little. 
We find them traversed by intrusive dykes of what seems 
a grayish-colored trap, extremely obstinate in yielding to 
the hammer, and which stand up among the softer shales 
like the walls of some ruined village. They are trap-dikes 
in every essential except one; — they occur in every possi- 
ble angle of disagreement with the line of the strata: in 



3G7 



some places they inclose the shale in slim, insulated strips, 
as a river incloses its islands ; in others they traverse it 
with minute veins connected with the larger masses, in the 
way in which granite is so often seen traversing gneiss ; in 
yet others the limestone in contact with them seems posi- 
tively altered ; — the blue nodule has, at the line of junc- 
tion, its strip of crystalline white, and the shale assumes 
an indurated and veinous character ; the dikes are, in 
short, trap-dikes in every essential except one; but the 
wanting essential is of importance enough to constitute 
the problem in the case; — they are not composed of trap. 
Some of our mineralogists have been a good deal puzzled 
by finding crystals of sandstone as regular in their planes 
and angles as if formed of any of the earths, or salts, or 
metals, whose law it is to build themselves up into little 
erections correctly mathematical in every point and line ; 
and they have read the mystery by supposing that these 
sandstone crystals are mere casts moulded in the cavities 
in which crystals had once existed. The puzzle of the 
Lias dikes is of an exactly similar kind: they are com- 
posed, not of an igneous rock, but of a hard, calcareous 
sandstone, undistinguishable in hand-specimens from an 
indurated sandstone of the Lower Oolite, which may be 
found on the shore beneath Dunrobin, alternating with 
shale-becls of the period of the Oxford clay. I succeeded 
in finding in it, on one occasion, a shell in the same state 
of keeping in which shells are so often found in the resem- 
bling rocks of Sutherland, but the species unluckily could 
not be distinguished. A common microscope at once de- 
tects the mechanical character of the mass; and I have 
learned that Dr. Fleming, after reducing a portion of it, 
sent him as an igneous rock, to its original sand, simply by 



368 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

submerging it in acid, expressed some little fear lest the 
sender should not have been quite " up to trap." 

The explanation of the phenomenon seems rather diffi- 
cult. There are instances in which what had once been 
trap-dikes are found existing as mere empty fissures ; and 
other instances in which empty fissures have been filled up 
by aqueous deposition from above. An instance of the 
one kind is adduced, as the reader may perhaps remember, 
in the "Elements" of Lyell, from M'Culloch's "Western 
Islands;" two contiguous dikes traversing sandstone in 
Skye are found existing to a considerable depth as mere 
hollow fissures. An instance of the other kind may be 
found, says M'Culloch, in a trap-rock in Mull, which is 
traversed by a dike that, among its other miscellane- 
ous contents, incloses the trunk of a tree, converted into 
brown lignite. In cases of the first kind, the original dike, 
composed of a substance less suited to resist the action 
of the weather than the containing rock, has mouldered 
away, and left the vent from which it issued a mere hollow 
mould, in which the semblance of a dike might be cast, 
just as the decay and disappearance of the real crystal is 
supposed to have furnished a mould for the formation of 
the sandstone one. In cases of the second kind, we see 
the fictitious dike actually existing ; it is the sandstone 
crystal moulded and consolidated, and, in short, ready for 
the museum. And we have but to suppose the conditions 
of the two classes of dikes united, — we have but to sup- 
pose that the hollow filled by the aqueous deposition had 
been previously filled by an igneous injection, — in order 
to account for all the phenomena of an igneous dike ac- 
companying a merely aqueous one. We can scarce account 
in this way, however, for the formation of the dikes at 
Eathie, seeing that the shale in which they are included is 



a geologist's portfolio. 369 

of so soft and decaying a character, that no igneous rock 
could of possibility be more so ; nor, even were the case 
otherwise, could the upper portion of the dykes have exis- 
ted as open chasms during the period in which the process 
of decay would have been taking place in the depths be- 
low. They would have infallibly filled up with the frag- 
ments detached from the sides and edges. 

Mr. Strickland, in a paper on the subject in the "Trans- 
actions of the London Geological Society," states the 
problem very strongly. "The substance of these dikes is 
such," he says, " that it is impossible to refer them to a 
purely igneous origin ; " and yet, however much " it may 
resemble an aqueous product," it is as impossible to doubt 
that the dikes themselves are genuine "intrusive dikes 
penetrating the Lias shale in all directions." He adds 
further, as his ultimate conclusion in the matter, that the 
" sedimentary structure of the rock forbids us to refer it to 
igneous injection from below;" and that, "notwithstand- 
ing the complete resemblance of these intrusive masses to 
ordinary plutonic dikes, we have no resource left but to 
refer them to aqueous deposition, filling up fissures which 
had been previously formed in the Lias." There is a pecu- 
liar rock in the neighborhood, which throws, I am of opin- 
ion, very considerable light on their origin. It is what 
may be termed a syenitic gneiss, abounding in minute 
crystals of hornblende, that impart to it a greenish hue ; 
and in one place we find it upheaved so directly among 
the Lias beds, that it breaks their continuity. It raised 
them so high on its back, that the denuding agencies laid 
the back bare by sweeping them away. Let us but imag- 
ine that this disturbing rock began to rise under the ear- 
lier impulsions of the elevating agencies, and during the 
deposition of some one of the later secondary formations, 



370 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

as the precursor of the granitic range, — that the super- 
incumbent Lias, already existing in its present consolidated 
state, opened into yawning rents and fissures over it, as 
the earth opened in Calabria during the great earthquake, 
— and that the loose sand and calcareous matter which 
formed the sea-bottom at the time, borne downwards by 
the rushing water, suddenly filled up these rents, ere the 
yielding matrix had time to lose any of its steepness of 
side or sharpness of edge, which it could not have failed 
to have done had the process been a slow one. The sand- 
stone dikes, apparently Oolitic, mark, it is probable, the 
first operations of those upheaving agencies to which we 
owe the elevation of the granitic wall, and which, ere they 
accomplished their work, may have been active during oc- 
casional intervals for a series of ages. I am not of opinion 
that the accompanying marks of alteration among the 
shales and limestones of the beds are sufficiently unequiv- 
ocal to render imperative some more fiery theory. 



CONTEMPORARY AND EXTINCT TYPES OF THE LIFE OF THE 
TEREBRATULA. 

We find among the earliest bivalves of the Silurian Sys- 
tem the delicate Terebratula, with its punctured umbone ; 
we follow it downwards through all the various formations, 
and see it appearing on each succeding stage, specifically 
new, but generically old, until, quitting the rocks with 
their dead remains, we pass to the existing testacea of our 
seas, and find among them the ancient Terebratula still 
extant as a living shell. Contemporary as a genus with 
every extinct form of animal life, we find it contemporary 
with the last of created beings also, — contemporary with 
ourselves ; and the Terebratula is but one existence of a 



371 



class to which, though their generic antiquity may be 
rather less remote, nearly the same remark applies. The 
ostrea still exists, — its congener and contemporary, the 
gryphaea, has perished; the nautilus survives, — its congener 
and contemporary, the ammonite, is long since dead ; the 
cuttle-fish abounds on our shores, — its congener and con- 
temporary, the belemnite, is to be found in only our rocks. 
And thus the list runs on. We can scarce glance over a 
group of fossils, whatever its age, which we do not find 
divisible into two classes of types, — the types which still 
remain, and the types which have disappeared. But why 
the one set of forms should have been so repeatedly called 
into being, and why the other set should have been suf- 
fered to become obsolete, we cannot so much as surmise. 
Why, it may be asked, should the nautilus continue to 
exist, and yet the ammonite have ceased with the ocean 
that deposited the Chalk? or why should we have cuttle- 
fish in such abundance, and yet no belemnites? or why 
should not the gryphaaa have been reproduced in every 
succeeding period with the oyster? In visiting some old 
family library, that has received no accessions to its cata- 
logue for perhaps more than a century, one is interested in 
marking its more vivacious classes of works, — its Specta- 
tors, and Robinson Crusoes, and Shakspeares, and Pilgrim's 
Progresses, — in their first, or at least earlier editions, 
ranged side by side with obsolete, long-forgotten volumes, 
their contemporaries, that died on their first appearance,* 
and with whose unfamiliar titles one cannot connect a sin- 
gle association. But it is always easy to say why, in the 
race of editions, the one class should have been arrested 
at the very starting post, and why the other should have 
gone down to be contemporary with every after produc- 
tion of authorship, until the cultivation of letters shall 



3T2 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

have ceased. It is otherwise, however, with the geologist. 
He finds he has exactly the same sort of fact to deal with, 
■ — an immense multiplication of editions, in the case of 
some particular type of fish, or plant, or shell, and, in the 
case of other types, no after instances of re-publication ; but 
he finds himself wholly unable to lay hold of any critical 
canon through which to determine why the one class of 
types should have been so often re-published, or the other 
so peremptorily suppressed. And yet, were all the circum- 
stances known, it is possible that some such canon might 
be found to exist. Geology is still in its infancy. Shall a 
day ever arrive when, in a state of full maturity, it will be 
able to appeal to its fixed canons, and to say why one cer- 
tain type of existence was fitted for but one definite stage 
in the progress of things, and some other certain type 
fitted, by a peculiar catholicity of adaptation, for every 
succeeding period? 

SIR DAVID BREWSTER ON THE CUTTLE-FISH AND BELEMNITE. 

The following discovery of Sir David Brewster, regard- 
ing a marked peculiarity of structure in the eye of the 
cuttle-fish, now first made public, will be deemed of great 
interest by all who have learned to admire that inconceiv- 
able variety of design in the works of the Infinite Mind 
which grows upon the inquirer the more he examines, and 
which, if man were not immortal, it would be an error of 
his very nature to have the strong existing desire to exam- 
ine: 

St. Leonard's College, St. Andrews. 
My Dear Sir, — I have been reading, with great pleas- 
ure, your" interesting account of the cuttle-fish, and was 
glad to find that you had noticed the singular structure of 

m 



A geologist's portfolio. 373 

its eye. During the last twenty years I have dissected lit- 
erally hundreds of cuttle-fish eyes, but I never published 
my observations on them, in consequence of having found 
singular discrepancies in the eyes of different species, and 
having been always expecting from America the eyes of 
the remarkable varieties which occur there, and which 
have been repeatedly promised me by American natur- 
alists. 

As you will take a great interest in the subject, I shall 
endeavor to give you some idea of what I have done. 

Independent of the peculiarity which you have noticed, 
of there being no aqueous chamber between the cornea and 
the lens, there is no iris and no pupil, the quantity of light 
admitted being regulated by the eyelids. 

The lens itself is of a most singular description. It con- 
sists of two lenses sticking together, and capable of being 
separated without injuring either. This structure is unique. 
The lens D A E C consists of two, D A 
E, and a meniscus, m C n, which is kept 
close to D A C by a double cartilagin- 
ous ring, D E. The dimensions are D 
E = 0-51 inch, AC = 0-433 inch, A B 
== 0-3433 inch, BC = 0-09 inch; m n 
= 0-333 inch. The outer diameter of the front ring, D F, 
is = 0*59 inch, and its inner diameter = 0*31 inch. 

In some indurated lenses I find the lens C to be doubly 
convex, and the surface of the lens D E A, on which it 
rests, concave. This must have been the lens of a differ- 
ent species. 

The fibrous structure of the lens is very remarkable. 
The laminae, or coats, of the lens are parallel toDAE 
and m C n; and the fibres of the lens DAE diverge from 
A as a pole, like the meridians of a globe ; and they all 

32 




374 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

terminate, not in another pole, but in the surface D E, or 
that which corresponds with m o ri. This termination of 
the whole component fibres of the lens DAE in a surface 
is quite unique, and the mode of converting this rough 
plane (like a shaving-brush cut across), into a smooth sur- 
face, is singularly beautiful. Each elementary coat, or 
lamina, being composed of fibres, has at its termination in 
the periphery D E a sort of selvage, where all the fibres 
end ; and these selvages, being circles, fill up, as it were, 
or compose the flat surface of the lens. 

The coats, or laminae, consist of fibres different from 
those of all other animals. When other lenses harden, 
they form a solid body, transparent like a gum ; but the 
cuttle-fish retains its laminated structure, and shines with 
all the brilliancy of & pearl. 

In the Scepia Electona the front lens A 
separates from B in the line m ah c n, a pe- 
culiarity which I have never found in the 
/Scepia Loligo. The diameter A B is larger 
than m n. 

It would be curious to find the lenses in a 
fossil state. 

I have found some lenses of the Scepia 
Loligo of a paraboloidal form. It is probable that the 
form of the lens varies with the age of the animal. 

When the lenses become indurated, they often exhibit 
the most beautiful internal reflections, and I have often 
thought of having them set as brooches. The pearly 
structure is produced by long exposure under ground ; 
and it is almost impossible to distinguish such lenses from 
pearls when the convex part only is shown. — I am, my 
dear Sir, ever most truly yours, 

D. Brewster. 

To Hugh Miller, Esq. 




THEORY OF THE OCEAN'S LEVEL 



AS AFFECTED BY THE RISING OR SINKING OF THE LAND. 



The mean level of the sea, cannot be regarded as a fixed 
line, unless, during the geologic changes of the past, it has 
invariably maintained the same distance from the earth's 
centre. If the earth, in consequence of the expansive 
influence of a vastly higher temperature than that which 
in the present era it possesses, was once greatly bulkier 
than it is now, the line, in proportion to the bulk, would 
be farther removed than it is now from the centre. The 
sea would stand greatly higher than at its present line. 
And who that has surveyed the contortions, the bends, the 
inflections, the ever-recurring rises and falls, of the more 
ancient stratified rocks, such as our Scotch grauwacke for 
instance, — bends and inflections that forcibly remind the 
geologist of the foldings of a loose robe, grown greatly 
too large for the shrunken body which it covers, — or that 
has weighed the yet farther evidence furnished by the 
carboniferous vegetation, extra-tropical in character even 
in Greenland, — who, I say, that has considered this evi- 
dence will venture to decide that the earth's temperature 
was not higher, nor the earth's radius greater, in the days 
of the Silurian period, or of the Coal Measures, than it is 
now ? And, of course, if the earth's radius was greater, 



376 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

the level line of the sea must have stood higher, — vastly 
higher, it seems not impossible, than the line now touched, 
by the summits of our highest mountains. Had there 
been a graduated pole of adamant, equal in length to the 
radius of the globe, placed in that ocean of the Silurian 
period in which our Scotch graptolites lived, — a pole with 
its lower end fixed immovably at the earth's centre, and 
its upper end level with the medium surface of the sea, — 
where, I marvel, would that upper end be now ? High, I 
suspect in the clouds ; nay, in an attenuated atmosphere, 
to which cloud never now ascends. The graduated mark- 
ings of the pole, indicatory not merely of how the tide, 
but also of how the land, has fallen, would, I doubt not, 
be found more conveniently summable in leagues than in 
fathoms. 

But even setting aside all this as fanciful and extrava- 
gant, — even taking it as a given fact (what, I suspect, is 
no fact at all) that the earth's bulk has not very materially 
altered, the line of the sea-level may have, notwithstand- 
ing, been considerably affected simply by the rise of the 
land. It is estimated that about one-fourth part of the sur- 
face of the globe is occujried, according to the present 
distribution of oceans and continents, by land, and the 
remaining three-fourths by water ; or, more correctly, that 
the land is as one, and the water as 2.76. Let us suppose 
this fourth part of land annihilated to the mean depth of 
the ocean. Of course, the effect would be, that the ocean, 
having then to cover four parts, instead of three, would 
sink, all over the globe, exactly one-fourth part of its mean 
depth. If the mean depth of the ocean^ be, as has been 
estimated, four miles, the fall in its level that would take 
place, in consequence of this annihilation of the land, 
would be just a single mile. And, of course, a creation 



A geologist's portfolio. 377 

of land at the bottom of the sea, which would rise to its 
surface, would, on the same principle, and in exactly the 
same ratio, have the effect of elevating the ocean level. It 
would do on a large scale what the pebbles dropped by 
the crow in the fable into the pitcher did on a small one. 
Nor must it be forgotten, that though creation and anni- 
hilation are terms which may seem suggestive of the fan- 
ciful and the extravagant,- there are phenomena exceed- 
ingly common in nature which, for all the purposes of my 
argument, would have exactly the effect of the things 
which these terms signify. In intense cold, the mercury 
in a thermometer is confined to the bulb of the instru- 
ment; plunged into boiling water, it straightway rises 
two hundred and twelve degrees in the tube ; and, when 
a second time subjected to the intense cold, it sinks again 
into the bulb, as at first. So far as mere bulk is con- 
cerned, there takes place what is analogous to a creation 
and annihilation of the quantity of mercury in the tube. 
Again, if a rod of lead a mile in length be raised in tem- 
perature from the freezing point to the point at which 
water boils, it lengthens rather more than five yards ; — 
what is equal to a creation of five yards of lead-rod has 
been effected. Cooled down again, however, the five 
yards are annihilated. A rod of flint-glass of the same 
length, raised to the same temperature, would stretch out 
only four feet, two inches, and rather more than seven 
lines. All the metals — even platinum — expand more 
than glass ; but were there some deep-lying stratum, five 
miles in thickness, of that portion of the earth's crust on 
which Great Britain rests, to be heated two hundred and 
twelve degrees above its present temperature, it would at 
even this comparatively low rate of expansion elevate the 
island more than twenty feet higher than now over the 

32* 



878 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

existing sea-level, — a height fully equal to that of by far 
the best marked of our ancient coast lines. And if this 
increase in temperature took place, not in a stratum of the 
the earth's crust five miles in thickness, underlying Great 
Britain, but in a stratum twenty miles in thickness, under- 
lying one-fourth the area of the bed of the ocean, the 
effect would of course be of a reverse character. This 
creation of land at the bottom of the sea would raise the 
ocean level nearly twenty feet all over the globe, and send 
the waves dashing around our own shores, against the 
ancient coast line, as of old. 

Nor do I see that the bearing of these consequences on 
the sea-line — consequences that would render its level 
dependent on the elevation or submergence of every con- 
tinent that has existed, or shall yet exist — can be set 
aside, save on the supposition that for every tract of land 
that rises, another tract of the same area and cubic con- 
tents sinks ; or, to state the case in other words, and more 
definitely, that for every protuberance formed within the 
sea, there is a corresponding hollow formed also within it 
elsewhere. Now, even were it to be granted that for 
every protuberance which rises on the earth's crust there 
is a corresponding depression of the surface, which takes 
place somewhere else (though on what principle this should 
be granted is not in the least obvious), I do not at all per- 
ceive why that dejoression should always take place within 
the sea. It may take place, not on any of the parts of the 
earth's surface covered by water, but on that fourth part 
occupied by land. It may take place on the table-land of 
a continent. Or, vice ve?'sa, a hollow formed in the sea, 
considerable enough to lower the sea's level, may find its 
counterbalancing protuberance in the further elevation of 
the interior of some vast tract, such as Asia or New Hoi- 



379 



land, already raised over the ocean. The submerged con- 
tinent of the Pacific, which now exists but as a wilderness 
of scattered atolls, may have been the contemporary with 
that of South America, existing at the time as a fiat tract, 
which simply occupied a certain area in the sea ; and the 
hollow which the submergence of the Polynesian land 
occasioned may possibly have been balanced by the rise 
of those enormous table-lands of Mexico and the adjacent 
countries that give to the entire continent in which they 
are included a mean elevation of more than a thousand 
feet; or the submergence of that Atlantis which was 
drained by the great rivers of the Wealden period may 
have been balanced, in like manner, by the rise of the still 
more extensive table-land of Asia : and in both cases the 
level of the sea could not fail to be very sensibly lowered. 
It would have in each instance the area of the submerged 
continent to occupy ; and there would be no correspond- 
ing elevation within its bed, to balance against the waste 
by the space which it filled. But why, I repeat, the bal- 
ancing theory at all ? If elevations or depressions can, as 
has been shown, be mere results of changes of tempera- 
ture in portions of the earth's crust, why deem it more 
necessary to hold that there is a refrigerating process tak- 
ing place under one area, in the exact proportion in which 
there is a heating process taking place under another, than 
to hold that when the mercury is rising in the tube of a 
thermometer, it is sinking in some other tube attached to 
the instrument, but not visible ? The argument, however, 
is one of those which can be reasoned out more con- 
clusively by lines than by words. It will be found, too, 
that the lines make out not only a more conclusive, but 
also a stronger case. 



380 



DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES EROM 

Ffe. II. 





Let the line 3, 3, in the diagram, fig. I., represent that 
of the sea's mean level ; the line 3 C, or 3 B, the sea's 
mean depth; the triangle B A C, a rising continent; and 
the internal triangles, whose apices reach the lines 3, 3, 
and 5, 5, respectively, its comparative bulk or volume dur- 
ing its various intermediate stages of elevation. When 
the rising triangle {i. e. continent) reaches the line 3, 3 
(that of the sea-line ere the land began to rise), its mass, 
equal to that of the parallelogramic band 1 B C 1, shall 
have displaced water to that amount, and sent it to the 
surface, which shall have risen, in consequence, from the 
line 3, 3, to the line 5, 5. When the continent reaches 
the line 5, 5, there will be another band, equal to half the 
mass of the first, displaced and sent to the surface, which 
shall now have risen to the line 6, 6 ; and not until 
the point of the triangle (i. e. continent) has reached the 
line 7, 7, will it have overtaken the rising surface. Such, 
in proportion to its bulk, would be the effect, on the ocean- 
level, of a rising continent, were there to be no equivalent 
sinking of the surface elsewhere, — just as, when the mer- 
cury of the thermometer is rising in the tube, there is no 



A geologist's portfolio. 381 

corresponding sinking of metal contained in the instru- 
ment elsewhere, or, even if there were an equivalent sink- 
ing, were that sinking to take place in the interior of some 
immense tract of table-land. 

Let us now, however, turn to the diagram fig. II., and 
consider whether the full realization of the fiction of sink- 
ing hollows within the sea, exactly correspondent in their 
cubic contents to the rising continents, would be at all 
adequate to preserve the hypothetical fixity of ocean sur- 
face. Let the line B, C, fig. II. represent the bottom of 
the ocean, and the triangle B, A, C, a depression of the 
earth's crust, exactly equal in cubic amount to the rising 
land in fig. I., and taking place exactly at the same time. 
It will be at once seen, in running over the details, that 
even the hypothesis of balancing hollows formed in the 
sea as a set-off against the elevations, is wholly insufficient 
to establish the theory of a fixed line of sea-level. The 
hollow might be formed, and yet the level affected not- 
withstanding. Until the elevation had risen above the 
line 3, 3, in the diagram fig. L, and the corresponding 
hollow sunk to the line 3, 3, in the diagram fig. II., the 
surface-line would remain unaffected, — the water displaced 
by the rising eminence would be contained in the sinking 
hollow ; but immediately as the land rose over the surface, 
there would be a j^ortion of it — the sub-aerial portion — 
which would displace no water. The hollow, if it took 
place in the exact ratio of the elevation, — and such is the 
stipulated condition of the theory, — would receive, after 
this point, exactly double the quantity of water that the 
land displaced, and the line of the sea-level would foil. 
When the elevation would have risen to the point A of 
the one diagram, and the hollowing depression sunk to the 
point A of the other, the amount of water received over 
water displaced would be equal in quantity to one of the 



382 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

parallelogramic bands, 1 2, 2 I, or 2 3, 3 2, fig. I.; and the 
sea-level would in consequence sink to the line 2, 2. The 
exactly balanced hollow would fail to preserve the balance. 
And so I cannot continue to hold as a first principle, 
that the line of the sea-level is a fixed and stable line ; 
seeing that ere I could do so I would have to believe, first, 
that the earth's radius has undergone no diminution since 
the earliest geologic periods in which an ocean existed ; 
second, that for every elevation which takes place on the 
surface of the globe there takes place a corresponding 
depression upon it elsewhere ; third, that if the elevation 
takes place within the bed of the sea, the depression also 
takes place within the bed of the sea ; and, fourth, that 
the elevations and depressions bear always a nicely-adjusted 
proportion to each other in their contents, — different at 
two different stages of their formation, — being up to a 
certain point exactly as one to one ; and after that point 
has been reached, exactly as one to two. And I can find 
no adequate grounds for believing all this. But though it 
be thus far from self-evident that the mean level of the 
ocean is a fixed line, its rises and falls must have been 
slight indeed compared with those of the land. There 
are some of the Alps more than fifteen thousand feet in 
height ; but, if spread equally over Europe, they would 
raise the general surface, says Humboldt, little more than 
twenty-one feet. And the displaced masses of the ocean, 
whether occasioned by the rising or the sinking of conti- 
nents, have always to be spread over a surface thrice 
greater than that of all the land. A displacement, how- 
ever, effected by the sinking of a continent which bore as 
large a proportion to the ocean as that borne by the Alps 
to Europe, would lower the general sea-line from the 
mean level of by far the best-marked of our ancient coast 
lines to the mean level of the existing one. 



THE CHAIN OF CAUSES. 



" It is no recent discovery," says an ingenious French 
writer of the last century, "that there is no effect without 
a cause, and that often the smallest causes produce the 
greatest effects. Examine the situations of every people 
upon earth ; — they are founded on a train of occurrences 
seemingly without connection, but all connected. In this 
immense machine all is wheel, pully, cord, or spring. It is 
the same in physical nature. A wind blowing from the 
southern seas and the remotest parts of Africa brings with 
it a portion of the African atmosphere, which, falling in 
showers in the valleys of the Alps, fertilizes our lands. 
On the other hand, our north wind carries our vapors 
among the negroes : we do good to Guinea, and Guinea 
to us. The chain. extends from one end of the universe 
to the other." Waiving, however, for the present, the 
moral view of the question, I may be permitted to present 
my readers with an illustration of the physical one, — i. e. 
the dependence of the conditions of one country on the 
cbnditions on which some other and mayhap very distant 
country exists, — which may be new to some of them, and 
which the Frenchman just quoted could have little antici- 
pated. 

When in the island of Bute, to which I had gone on 
two several occasions in the course of a few weeks, in 



38-1 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

order to examine what are known to geologists as the 
Pleistocene deposits of the Kyles, my attention was di- 
rected to a deep excavation which had just been opened 
for the construction of a gas tank in the middle of the 
town of Rothesay. It was rather more than twenty feet 
in depth, and passed through five different layers of soil. 
First, passing downwards, there occurred about eighteen 
inches of vegetable mould, and then about seven feet of a 
partially consolidated ferruginous gravel, which rested on 
about eighteen inches more of peat moss, — once evidently 
a surface soil, like the overlying one, though of a different 
character, — abounding in what seemed to be the frag- 
ments of a rank underwood, and containing many hazel- 
nuts. Beneath this second soil there lay fully nine feet of 
finely stratified sea-sand ; and under all, a bed of arena- 
ceous clay, which the workmen penetrated to the dejrth 
of about two feet, but, as they had attained to the required 
depth of their excavation, did not pass through. And this 
bed of clay, at the depth of fully twenty feet from the 
surface, abounded in sea-shells, — not existing in the petri- 
fied condition, but, save that they had become somewhat 
porous and absorbent, in their original state. Not a few 
of them retained the thin brown epidermis, unchanged in 
color ; and the gaping and boring shells, whose nature it 
is to burrow in clay and sand, and which were present 
among them in two well-marked species, occupied, as 
shown by their position, the place in which they had 
lived and died. Now, of these ancient deep-lying shells, 
though a certain portion of them could be recognized as 
still British, there were proportionally not a few that no 
longer live within the British area ; — in vain might the 
conchologist cast dredge for them in any sea that girdles 
the three kingdoms ; and the whole, regarded as a group, 



a geologist's portfolio. 385 

differ from any other that exists in Europe in the present 
day. Ere, however, I pass on to decipher the record 
which they form, or translate into words the strange old 
pre-historic facts with which they are charged, let me 
briefly refer to the overlying deposits, and the successive 
periods of time which they seem to represent. 

The upper layer of vegetable mould here fully exhausts 
the historic period. And yet the fine old town of Rothe- 
say is not without its history. The ancient ivy-clad castle 
of the place is situated scarce a minute's walk from the 
excavation ; the same stratum of vegetable mould lies 
around that forms the upper layer in the pit, furnishing 
rich footing to shrub and tree ; and its great moat, de- 
serted long since by the waters, was excavated of old in 
the ferruginous gravel. And yet, though compared with 
the age of the gravel-bed on which it stands, the date of 
its erection is as of yesterday: history fails to trace its 
origin ; we only know that it was already an important 
stronghold in the days of Haco of Norway, one of whose 
captains besieged and took it, — that Robert III. of Scot- 
land died broken-hearted within its walls, — and that it 
still furnishes with his second title the heir-apparent of the 
British throne. On many other parts of the coast, though 
apparently not here, this gravel-bed contains shells, all of 
which, unlike those of the arenaceous clay beneath, still 
live around our shores, and most of which occurred, ere the 
last upheaval of the land, as dead shells on the beaches of 
the old coast line. The old line itself, against which the 
sea seems to have stood for ages ere the final upheaval, is 
present here immediately behind the town, in an emi- 
nently characteristic form. Its precipices of rough con- 
glomerate still exhibit the hollow lines, worn of old by 
the surf, and occupy such places in relation to the build- 

33 



386 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES PROM 

ings below as prove that even the oldest erections of the 
town, with the first beginnings of the castle, were all raised 
on one of its wave-deserted beaches. But the annals of 
Rothesay, notwithstanding their respectable antiquity, or 
even such memorials of human origin in the neighborhood 
as altogether extend beyond the memory of history, ad- 
vance but comparatively a little way towards the period 
of the old coast line and the last upheaval. When, in the 
times of Julius Caesar, Diodorus Siculus wrote his big gos- 
sipping history, St. Michael's Mount, in Cornwall, was con- 
nected with the mainland at low water as it is now, — a 
fact good in evidence to show that since that age the 
respective levels of land and water have not altered in 
Britain. The old coast line must have been already 
upheaved when Caesar landed in the island. And yet, 
though, as shown by its profound caves and deeply ex- 
cavated hollows, the sea must have beaten against it dur- 
ing an immensely protracted period of depression, there 
existed a previous period of upheaval, represented by the 
layer of moss at the bottom of the gravel, when the land 
must have stood considerably higher over the sea-level 
than it does now. In many localities around the shores 
of Britain and Ireland, the moss-bed which so often under- 
lies the bed of old coast gravel is found to run out under 
the sea to depths never laid bare by the tide ; and yet, at 
least as low as the sea ever falls, it is found bearing its 
stumps and roots of bushes and trees of existing species, 
that evidently occupy the place in which they had origi- 
nally grown and decayed. These submerged mosses, as 
they are termed, occur along the sides of the Friths of 
Tay and Forth, and in at least one locality on the southern 
side of Moray Frith ; on the west coast they lie deep in 
lochs and bays ; they occur on various parts of the coasts 



a geologist's portfolio. 887 

of Ireland ; and off the shores of Erris and Tyrawly have 
furnished a basis for strange legends regarding an en- 
chanted land, which once in every seven years raises its 
head above the water, green with forests and fields, but 
on which scarce any one has succeeded in landing. They 
occur also on the English shores, in one interesting in- 
stance in the immediate neighborhood of that St. Michael's 
Mount which, from the description of the Sicilian historian, 
furnishes a sort of negative measure of the period during 
which the gravel bed immediately over them was elevated. 
"On the strand of Mount's Bay, midway between the piers 
of St. Michael's Mount and Penzance, on the 10th of Jan- 
uary, 1757," says Borlase, in his "Natural History of Corn- 
wall," " the remains of a wood, which anciently must have 
covered a large tract of ground, appeared. The sands had 
been drawn off from the shore by a violent sea, and had 
left several places, twenty yards long and ten wide, washed 
bare, strewed with stones like a broken causeway, and 
wrought into hollows somewhat below the rest of the 
sands. This gave me an opportunity of examining the 
following parts of the ancient trees : — In the first pool 
part of the trunk appeared, and the roots in their whole 
course, eighteen feet long and twelve wide, were displayed 
in a horizontal position. The trunk at the fracture was 
ragged ; and beside the level range of the roots which lay 
round it was part of the body of the tree, just above 
where the roots divided. Of what kind it was there did 
not remain enough positively to determine. The roots 
were pierced plentifully by the teredo or auger worm. 
Thirty feet to the west we found the remains of another 
tree : the ramifications extended ten feet by six ; there 
was no stock in the middle ; it was therefore part of the 
under or bottom roots of the tree, pierced also by the 



388 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

teredo, and of the same texture as the first. Fifty feet to 
the north of the first tree we found part of a large oak: it 
was the body of a tree three feet in diameter ; its top in- 
clined to the east. We traced the body of this tree, as it 
lay shelving, the length of seven feet; but to what further 
depth the body reached we could not discern, because of 
the immediate influx of water as soon as we had made a 
pit for discovery. It was firmly rooted in earth six inches 
from the surface of the sand. Not so fixed was the stock 
of a willow tree, with the bark on, one foot and a half in 
diameter, within two paces of the oak. The timber was 
changed into a ruddy color ; and hard by we found part 
of a hazel-branch, with its glossy bark on. The earth in 
all the tried places appeared to be a black, cold marsh, 
filled with fragments of leaves of the Jimcus aquaticus 
maximus. The place where I found the trees was three 
hundred yards below full sea-mark. The water is twelve 
feet deep upon them when the tide is in." It will be seen 
from this description, — and it agrees with that of our 
submerged forests of the period generally, ■ — that the trees 
which grew on this nether soil, when the level of the land 
stood considerably higher than it does now, were exactly 
those of our present climate, — a fact borne specially out 
by the numerous hazel-nuts which the deposit almost 
everywhere contains. The hazel is one of the more deli- 
cate indigenous trees of the country. It was long ago 
remarked in Scotland by intelligent farmers of the old 
school, that "a good nut year was always a good oat year;" 
and that "as the nut filled the oat filled." And now our 
philosophical botanists confirm the truthfulness of the ob- 
servation embodied in these proverbial sayings, by select- 
ing the hazel as the indigenous plant which most nearly 
resembles in its constitution the hardier cereals. It rises 



A geologist's portfolio. 



on our hill-sides to the height, but no higher, to which 
cultivation extends ; and where the hazel would fail to 
grow, checked by the severity of the climate, it would be 
in vain to attempt rearing the oat, or to expect any very 
considerable return from either rye or barley. The exis- 
tence of hazel-nuts, then, in this mossy stratum, is fraught 
w T ith exactly the same sort of evidence regarding the cli- 
mate of that period of upheaval which it represents, as 
that borne by the shells of the overlying gravel to the 
subsequent period when the sea stood against the old 
coast line. Equally during both periods our country pos- 
sessed its present comparatively genial climate, — the finest 
enjoyed by any country in the world situated under the 
same latitudinal lines. But the bed beneath gives evi- 
dence of an entirely different state of things. 

Under the stratum of moss, as we have already said, 
there occurs in the Rothesay pit a thick bed of stratified 
sea-sand, and under the sand a bed of clay charged with 
shells ; and these shells exist no longer as a group in the 
British seas. Regarded as characters charged with the 
climatal history of the period that represents the stratum 
in which they occur, the following list, with the attached 
explanations, may be regarded as indicative of the mean- 
ings which they bear. We may mention, that the greater 
number of the specimens specified were collected in the 
pit after our first visit to it, by Mr. John Richmond of the 
Temperance Hotel, Rothesay, to whose intelligent guidance 
and direction the geologic traveller, desirous of cultivating 
an adequate acquaintance with the Pleistocene deposits of 
the island in the least possible time, would do well to com- 
mit himself. 

33* 



390 



DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 



Natica clausa, 

Trophon scalar if or me, 
Buccinw)i Humphreysianum, 

Trochus inflatus, 

Undcscribed natica, 
Trophon clathratus, 
Littorina rudis, 
TeUina proxima, 



Saxicava sulcata, 
Mya Uddevallensis, 



Undescribed modiola, 



Mya truncata, 
Saxicava rugosa, 
Lucina Jiexuosa, 
Astarte compressa, 
Nucula Nucleus, 



Not now a British species, but found living 
in the North Sea as far as Spitsbergen, 
and on the shores of boreal America. 

Not now British, but living in the same 
boreal seas as the other. 

One of the rarest of British shells. "It 
appears," say Messrs. Forbes & Hanley 
in their history of the British Mollusca, 
"to be an arctic form lingering in our 
fauna." 

Not now British; existing habitat unascer- 
tained. 

Ditto : ditto. 

British; but also boreal. 

Ditto : ditto. 

Not yet found living in the British area, 
but abundant on the coasts of Greenland, 
boreal America, etc. 

Not now British. 

Now deemed a variety of Myatruncata, but, 
save that it was found in one instance by 
Dr. Fleming among the Shetland Islands, 
not a British, but a boreal variety. 

Not now British : existing habitat unascer- 
tained. 



British ; but also boreal. 



Such were the shells found in the arenaceous clay-bed 
of the Rothesay pit, full twenty feet from the surface; and 
from where, in various other parts of the country, the 
same bed has been reached by excavations, or found crop- 
ping out along the shores, the list has been greatly in- 
creased. At Balnakaille Bay, for instance, in the Kyles 
of Bute, where Mr. Smith of Jordanhill, — one of our 
highest authorities on the Pleistocene formation, — first de- 



A geologist's portfolio. 891 

tected the deposit, we found several specimens of the Pec- 
ten Islandicus, — a fine shell, which, though abundant on 
the coast of Labrador, has not been found living on those 
of Britain ; with specimens of Panopea Nbrwegica, — a 
massive shell, of the same boreal character, recently, how- 
ever, found on our coast ; though such its extreme rarity, 
that a conchological friend tells us he was lately offered a 
British specimen for sale, at the not very moderate price 
of two pounds ten shillings. Even in the instance in 
which the shells are not only British, but also not of ex- 
treme rarity, the proportions in which they occur in the 
beds are certainly exotic. Astarte ettiptica, for instance, 
is 'by no means a common Astarte in the Scottish seas, nor 
is it all known in those of England or Ireland ; whereas 
in Greenland it is very abundant ; and in those beds in 
which it is the prevailing Astarte, it is in the Greenlandic, 
not in the Scottish proportions, in which it occurs. In 
the same way Cyprina Islandica, though comparatively 
rare in the Frith of Clyde, is not rare in the Scottish seas 
generally ; but it is in the seas of Iceland, as its name im- 
plies, that it attains to its fullest numerical development; 
and in the Pleistocene beds of the Clyde it is in the Ice- 
landic, not the Scottish proportions, that we find it. The 
same remark applies to Cardium Nbrwegica and Astarte 
compressa, with not a few others ; and still more strongly 
to another Astarte, not rare in the Pleistocene deposits of 
at least Banffshire and Caithness, but so exceedingly rare 
as Scottish in the present age of the world, that the late 
Professor Edward Forbes, — indefatigable dredger as he 
was, — had to borrow from a friend the Scottish specimen 
which he figures in his great work. But though of such 
unfrequent occurrence in the Scottish seas, it is common 
in those of Nova Zembla and within the Arctic circle; 



392 DESCEIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

and it is in the proportions in which it is developed in the 
high latitudes that we now find it in the Pleistocene beds 
of Scotland. 

But how interpret so curious a fact as the occurrence in 
this country of beds of shells (evidently occupying the 
place in which they had lived and died) whose proper cli- 
matal habitat is now some ten or fifteen degrees farther to 
the north ? There is nothing more fixed than the nature 
of species. Art, within certain limits exerts an acclimatiz- 
ing power ; Alpine plants may be found, for instance, liv- 
ing, if not flourishing, within the Botanic Gardens of 
Edinburgh, elevated scarce a hundred feet above the level 
of the sea ; but every scientific gardener knows how ex- 
tremely difficult it is to keep those alive in the too genial 
temperature of situation greatly lower than the one natu- 
ral to them ; and that while intertropical plants may be 
easily maintained in existence through the judicious appli- 
cation of artificial heat, the sub-arctic or Alpine plants are 
ever and anon dying out. And never do they so change 
their natures as of themselves to propagate their kind down- 
wards from the hill-tops to the plains. They on no occa- 
sion violate the climatal conditions imposed upon them by 
nature. It is so also with the animal world, and especially 
with shells. There are shells reckoned British, so deli- 
cately sensible of cold, that their northern limit barely 
touches the southern shores of Britain. That fine bivalve 
Cytherea chione is one of these, never getting farther north 
than Caernavon Bay; Cardium rusticum, so graphically 
described by Mr. Kingsley in his " Glaucus," under the 
style and title of Signor Tuberculato, is another, rang- 
ing southward to the Canaries, but barely impinging, in 
its northern limits, on the shores of Devon and Cornwall; 
and our splendid Haliotus, or ear-shell, IT. tubercidata. 



a geologist's portfolio. 893 

though reckoned British by courtesy, does not even touch 
the British shores, but finds its northern limit at the Chan- 
nel Islands. Nor are the northern shells more tolerant of 
warm than the southern ones of cold water. We have 
already referred to Astarte elliptica as finding its southern 
line of boundary on the Scottish coasts ; Pecten Niveus 
has not occurred to the south of the Frith of Clyde ; and 
Trochus undulatus, though it ranges to Greenland, barely 
reaches our northern and western shores. Such and so 
nice is the dependence of shells on conditions of tempera- 
ture, and such and so nice is their restriction to climatal 
areas. Nor could they have had a different nature in the 
past. How, then could the cold Nat lea clausa and Tro- 
phon scalariforme of Spitzbergen and boreal America, and 
the Tellina proxima and Mya Uddevallensis of Greenland 
and the North Cape, have been at one time living deni- 
zens of the bay of Rothesay? Under what strange cir- 
cumstances could whole scalps of the Pecten Islandieus 
have thriven in the Kyles of Bute, accompanied by groups 
of boreal jSaxicava, that dug themselves houses in the 
stiff clay, and massive Panopea, that burrowed in the 
mud ? The island of Bute is famous for now possessing 
perhaps the finest climate in Scotland ; exotics blow in its 
gardens and shrubberies, that demand elsewhere the shel- 
ter of a greenhouse ; and yet there was a time when, 
judging from the extreme boreal character of its shells, it 
pined under a severe and ungenial climate, in which even 
the hardier cereals could not have ripened. How account 
for a state of things so very unlike the present? 

Questions in natural science cannot be resolved with all 
the certainty of questions in astronomical or mathematical 
science. Adams and Le Verrier could not only infer from 
the disturbances of Uranus the existence of a hitherto un- 



39-4 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

known planet, but even indicate its place in the heavens. 
But though the varying cliraatal circumstances of our 
country, and of northern Europe generally, seem to have 
depended scarce less surely on the varying physical condi- 
tions of another country three thousand miles away, than 
the irregularities of the planet Uranus did upon the mass 
and position of the planet Nej^tune, we question whether 
any amount of skill, or intimacy of acquaintance with the 
phenomena, could have led to an a priori anticipation of 
the fact. We shall afterwards show, however, that the cli- 
mate of northern Europe is mainly dependent on the condi- 
tions of northern America; and that one certain change in 
its condition gave to our country the severe climate which 
obtained when Natica clausa and Telliaa proximo, lived 
in the bay of Rothesay; and that it is a result of another 
certain change in its condition, that the delicate fuschia 
now expands its purple bells in Bute on the soil by which 
great deep-lying accumulations of these sub-arctic shells 
are covered. 

Let us first remark, that during the period of the boreal 
shells the land was greatly depressed. The subsequent de- 
pression — that represented in the Rothesay excavation by 
the upper gravel-bed, — that which succeeded the age of 
the submerged mosses, — that during which the waves 
broke against the old coast line, — seems to have been 
restricted to a descent of some thirty, or at most forty, feet 
beneath the level which the land at present maintains; 
whereas the previous depression — that represented by the 
bed of arenaceous clay and the boreal shells — must have 
been a depression of many hundred feet. No sucli infer- 
ence, however, could be based on any of the Bute deposits 
which we have yet seen ; and yet we might safely con- 
clude, even from them, that when the deep-sea shells lived 



a geologist's portfolio. 895 

where we now find them, the land must have sat compar- 
atively low in the water. When scalps of JPecten Island- 
icus throve on the argillaceous bed cut open above tide- 
mark by the little stream which falls into Balnakaillie Bay, 
and noble Panopea burrowed in its stiff clay, Bute must 
have existed, not as one, but as three islands, separated 
from each other by ocean sounds occupying the three val- 
leys by which it is still traversed from side to side. In the 
neighboring mainland many a promontory and peninsula 
must have also existed as detached islands. The long 
promontory of Cantyre and Knapdale, traversed by open 
sounds at Tarbert and Crinan, must have formed two of 
these ; the larger part of the shire of Dumbarton, cut off 
from th# main land by straits passing inwards through the 
valleys of the Leven and of Loch Long, must also have 
borne an insular character; Loch Lomond must have ex- 
isted, not as a fresh-water lake, but as an interior sea; 
and, in fine, the whole geography of the British islands 
must have been widely different from what it is now. 
There are other localities, however, in which, from the ele- 
vation of the boreal shell-bed over the present sea-level, 
we are justified in inferring that the depression of the land 
must have been much greater than that indicated by the 
beds of Bute. The same bed, and containing the same 
shells, was laid open in forming the Glasgow and Greenock 
Railway, a little to the west of Port Glasgow, at an eleva- 
tion of about fifty feet over the high-water line. It was 
detected at Airdrie, about fifteen miles inland, in the first 
instance, at a height of three hundred and fifty feet over 
the sea, and subsequently at the still more considerable 
height of five hundred and twenty-four feet. We our- 
selves have disinterred the same shells from where they 
rested, evidently in situ, in Banffshire, — on the top, in 



393 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES EROM 

one instance, of a giddy cliff, elevated two hundred and 
thirty feet over the beach, — in another, lying deep in the 
side of a valley once a long withdrawing frith, but now 
fully six miles from the sea, and raised about a hundred 
and fifty feet above it. In Caithness they have been de- 
tected by Mr. Robert Dick at the greatest heights to which 
the boulder-clay attains; they occur also at very consider- 
able heights in the boulder-clay of the Isle of Man ; and 
were found by Mr. Trimmer in the drift of Moel Tryfon, 
in North Wales, at the extraordinary elevation over the 
sea of fifteen, hundred feet. When the boreal shells at 
Airdrie lived, Scotland must have existed as a wintry archi- 
pelngo, separated into three groups by the oceanic sounds 
of the great Caledonian Valley, and of the low flat valley, 
now traversed by the Union Canal, which extends between 
the Friths of Forth and Clyde. And when the shells of 
Moel Tryfon lived, only the higher parts of the Highlands 
of Scotland, and of the Cheviot and Lammermoor groups, 
could have had their heads elevated over the wintry ice- 
laden seas of the Pleistocene ages. There are grounds for 
holding that the period, though one geologically, was of 
vast extent, — that the degree of submergence was greater 
at one time and less at another ; or, more strictly speaking, 
that the commencement of the period was one of grad- 
ual depression in the British area, — that about its mid- 
dle term all was submerged, save the hill-tops and higher 
table-lands, — and that our country then began gradually 
to rise, until, about the close of the wintry eon, its level 
was mayhap scarce a hundred feet lower than it is at 
present. But though comparatively greater and less at 
different times, there seems to have been no time during 
the period, in which the depression was not absolutely 
great. 



a geologist's portfolio. 397 

Let us next remark, as very important to our argument, 
that not only was the period one of depression in the Brit- 
ish area, but also very extensively in the northern hemi- 
sphere generally. The shell-beds of Uddevalla — identi- 
cal in the character and species of their organisms with 
those of the Clyde — are elevated two hundred feet above 
the neighboring Cattegat; and in Russia Sir Roderick 
Murchison detected similar beds in the valley of the Dwina, 
lying nearly two hundred miles south-east of Archangel, 
and at least a hundred and fifty feet over the level of the 
White Sea. It is not uninteresting to mark, in the list of 
shells given by Sir Roderick in his great work on Russia, 
and which were the product, he states, of not more than 
two hours' exploration among these far inland beds, exactly 
the names of the same species that occurred in the Rothe- 
say excavation, or may be found in the Pleistocene depos- 
its of the Kyles. We recognize as the prevailing forms, 
JVatica clause^ JPecten Islandicus, Astarte elliptica, As- 
tarte compressa, Mya truncata in both its boreal and more 
ordinary varieties, and Tellina proximo,, with many others. 
The inscriptions borne by the Pleistocene of both Sweden 
and Russia are formed of the same character as those ex- 
hibited by the Pleistocene of our own country, and tell 
exactly the same story. But it is of still more importance 
to our argument, that the Pleistocene of America is also 
inscribed with similar characters, and is coupled with sim- 
ilar evidence. Shell-beds identical in their contents with 
those of the Clyde, Uddevalla, and the valley of the 
Dwina, have been detected in the neighborhood of Que- 
bec, at the height of two hundred feet over the Atlantic, 
and traced onwards by Mr. Logan, the accomplished state- 
geologist for the Canadas, to the height of four hundred 
and sixty feet. And in these American beds, separated 

34 



398 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

from those of the Dwina by a hundred and twenty degrees 
of longitude, Pecten Jslandicus, JVatica clause^ Mya trun- 
cata, Saxicava ruyosa, and Tellina proximo,, are the pre- 
vailing forms. How very wide the geographic area which 
these shells must have possessed of old ! A depression of 
the North American Continent to the amount of but four 
hundred and sixty feet would greatly affect its contour. 
It would cut it off from South America (the highest 
point over which the Panama Railway passed was but two 
hundred and fifty feet over the level of the sea), and 
unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by a broad channel, 
more than thirty fathoms in depth. But from various 
other appearances the American geologists claim for their 
country a much greater depression than even that of Moel 
Tryfon in Wales. It must have been depressed at least two 
thousand feet, and a wide sea must have passed through 
the valley of the Mississippi into what is now the Lake dis- 
trict, and from thence into Hudson's Bay and the Arctic 
Seas. And now, let the reader mark the probable effects 
on the climate of Northern Europe generally, and on that 
of Britain in particular, of so extensive a submergence of 
the American Continent. 

No other countries in the world situated under the same 
lines of latitude enjoy so genial a climate as that enjoyed 
by the British islands in the present day. The bleak 
coasts of Labrador lie in the same parallels as those of 
Britain and Ireland; St. John's, in Newfoundland, is situ- 
ated considerably to the south of Torquay in Devon ; and 
Cape Farewell, in Greenland, to the south of Kirkwall, 
the capital of the Shetland Islands. But how very differ- 
ent the climate of these bleak occidental lands, from that 
which renders Great Britain one of the first of agricul- 
tural countries ! At Nain, in Labrador, situated in the 



a geologist's portfolio. , 899 

same latitude as Edinburgh, the ground frost at the depth 
of a few feet from the surface never thaws, but forms an 
ungenial rock-like subsoil, against which the laborer breaks 
his tool, and over which the cereals fail to ripen. From 
the northern coasts of Newfoundland, though lying under 
the same latitudinal lines as the extreme south of England, 
there forms in winter a thick cake of ice, which, binding 
up the stormy sea, runs northwards and eastwards, and 
connects, as with a long bridge, the north of Iceland with 
the north of Newfoundland; thus constituting a natural 
isothermal line, which shows that the European island has 
a not severer climate than the American one, though it 
lies more than ten degrees farther to the north. And be 
it remembered that, did climate depend exclusively on a 
country's latitudinal position on the map, and its distance 
from the sun, it is the climate of Northern America that 
would be deemed the ordinary and proper climate, and 
that of Northern Europe the extraordinary and excep- 
tional one. Britain and Ireland owe the genial, equable 
warmth that ripens year after year their luxuriant crops, 
and renders their winters so mild that the sea never freezes 
around their shores, not, at least directly, to the distant 
sun. Like apartments heated by pipes of steam or hot 
water, or greenhouses heated by flues, they derive their 
warmth from a heating agent laterally applied ; they are 
heated by warm water. The great Gulf Stream, which, 
issuing from the Straits of Florida, strikes diagonally 
across the Atlantic, and, impinging on our coasts, casts 
upon them not unfrequently the productions of the West 
Indies, and always a considerable portion of the warmth 
of the West Indies, is generally recognized as the heating 
agent which gives to our country a climate so much more 
mild and genial than that of any other country whatever, 



400 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

similarly situated. Wherever its influence is felt, — and 
it extends as far north as the southern shores of Iceland, 
Nova Zembla, and the North Cape, — the sea in winter 
tells of its meliorating effects by never freezing ; it remains 
open, like those portions of a reservoir or canal into which 
the heated water of a steam-boiler is supposed to escape. 
In some seasons, — an effect of unknown causes, — the 
Gulf Stream impinges more strongly against our coast 
than at others: it did so in 1775, when Benjamin Franklin 
made his recorded observations upon it, — the first of 
any value which we possess ; and again during the three 
mild winters that immediately preceded the last severe 
one, — that of 1855, — and which owed their mildness 
apparently to that very circumstance. It was found dur- 
ing the latter seasons that the temperature of the sea 
around our western coasts rose from one and a half to two 
degrees above its ordinary average ; and it must be remem- 
bered how, during these seasons, every partial frost that 
set in at once yielded to a thaw whenever a puff of wind 
from the west carried into the atmosphere the caloric of 
the water over which it swept. The amount of heat dis- 
charged into the Atlantic by this great ocean-current is 
enormous. "A simple calculation," says Lieutenant Mau- 
ry, " will show that the quantity of heat discharged over 
the Atlantic from the waters of the Gulf Stream in a win- 
ter day would be sufficient to raise the whole column of 
atmosphere that rests upon France and the British Islands 
from the freezing point to summer heat." " It is the influ- 
ence of this stream upon climate," he adds, "that makes 
Erin the Emerald Isle of the sea, and clothes the shores 
of Albion with evergreen robes ; while, in the same lati- 
tude, on the other side, the shores of Labrador are fast 
bound in fetters of ice." 



a geologist's portfolio. 401 

Now, a depression beneatli the sea of the North Ameri- 
can continent would have the effect of depriving northern 
Europe of the benefits of this great heating current. Its 
origin has been traced to various causes, — some of them 
very inadequate ones. It has been said, for instance, that 
it is but a sort of oceanic prolongation of the Mississippi. 
It has been demonstrated, however, that it discharges 
through the Straits of Florida about a thousand times 
more water than the Mississippi does at its mouth ; and 
yet, even were the case otherwise, and the view correct, 
any great depression of North America would cut off the 
Mississippi from among the list of great rivers, by convert- 
ing the valley which it occupies into a sea, and would thus 
terminate the existence of the Gulf Stream. The Stream 
has, however, a very different and more adequate origin, 
but one which the depression of the North American Con- 
tinent would equally affect. It is a reaction on the great 
Drift Current. If the reader take a cup or basin filled 
with water, and blow strongly across the surface of the 
fluid, two distinct currents will be generated, — -a drift 
current, which, flowing in the direction of his breath, will 
impinge against the opposite side of the vessel, — and a 
reactionary current, which, passing along its sides, will 
return towards himself. And nothing can be more obvi- 
ous than the principle on which this occurs. The drift 
current, more immediately generated by his breath, heaps 
up the water against the side of the vessel on which it 
impinges ; and this heaped-up water must of course inevi- 
tably seek to return to the other side, in order to restore 
the deranged equilibrium of level. Now, the Northern 
Atlantic, — the Atlantic to the north of the equator, — 
displays on an immense scale exactly the phenomena ex- 
hibited by this simple experiment of the cup or basin. 

34* 



402 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

The breath of the trade-winds, ever blowing upon it from 
the east and north-east, in that broad belt which lies be- 
tween the tenth and the twenty-sixth degrees of north 
latitude, forms a great drift current, which, impinging on 
and heaping up the waters against the South American 
coast, — the opposite side of the cup or basin, — flows 
northwards into the Caribbean Sea and Mexican Gulf, 
and, issuing from the Straits of Florida in the character 
of the reactionary Gulf Stream, strikes diagonally across 
the Atlantic full on Northern Europe. But the existence 
of this reactionary stream is not merely and exclusively a 
consequence of the existence of the Drift Current : it is 
also equally a consequence of the existence of an Ameri- 
can continent. Save for the side of the basin or cup oppo- 
site to that whence the breath comes, the water, instead 
of returning in a reactionary current, would flow over. 
Such a wide breach in the sides of the cup along the Isth- 
mus of Panama, for instance, as a depression of but four 
hundred and sixty feet would secure, would permit the 
Drift Current to flow into the Pacific. Such a wide breach 
in the sides of the cup along the valley of the Mississippi 
as a depression equal to that indicated by the shells of 
Moel Tryfon would secure, would permit the reactionary 
Gulf Stream, though already formed, to escape, along what 
is now the lake district of America, into Hudson's Bay. 
In either case the Gulf Stream would be lost to Northern 
Europe; and the British Islands, robbed of the Gulf 
Stream, would possess merely the climate proper to their 
latitudinal position on the map; — they would possess such 
a climate as that of Labrador, where, beneath seas frozen 
over every winter many miles from the shore, exactly the 
same shells now live as may be found, in the sub-fossil 
state, in the Kyles of Bute, or underlying the pleasant 



A geologist's portfolio. 403 

town of Rothesay. A submergence of the North Ameri- 
can Continent would give to Britain and Ireland, with the 
countries of Northern Europe generally, what they all 
seem to have possessed during the protracted ages of the 
Pleistocene era, — a glacial climate. 

If our conclusions be just, — and we see not on what 
grounds they are to be avoided, — our readers will, we 
dare say, agree with us that it would not be easy to pro- 
duce a more striking illustration of the influences which 
are at times exerted by the conditions of one country on 
those of another. Our brethren of the United States are 
occasionally not a little jealous of the mother country; but 
we suspect all of them do not know how completely they 
could ruin her could they but succeed in keeping their 
great Gulf Stream to themselves. It might be unwise, 
however, to urge matters quite so far, lest they should 
provoke us, in turn, to demand back again the large brains 
and high-mettled blood which we have most certainly 
given them. Such of our readers as occasionally enjoy a 
summer vacation on the west coast might find it no dull 
or useless employment to begin reading for themselves the 
shell inscriptions borne by the Pleistocene deposits. It 
would at once form an excellent exercise in Conchology 
and a first lesson in Geology, which, from the interest it 
excited, would scarce fail to lead on to others. With their 
eyes educated to the work, too, they would find, we doubt 
not, the beds in many a new locality in which they had not 
been detected before, and enjoy the same sort of pleasure 
in falling upon a fresh deposit, as that enjoyed by an Egyp- 
tian or Assyrian antiquary when he discovers a catacomb 
of unrolled mummies never before laid open, or a series of 
sculptures or of inscriptions in the cuneiform character, 
unseen since the days of Semiramis or Sennacherib. W© 



404 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

ourselves once enjoyed such a pleasure at Fairlie. We 
laid open a noble bed, previously unknown, about a quar- 
ter of a mile to the north of the village ; and from amid 
great scalps of Pecten Islandicus, roughened on their 
upper valves by huge Balonidae, and from beside thick- 
lying groups of Cypinidse, we disinterred many a curious 
boreal shell, — great massive Panopea, graceful Veneridea, 
the Greenland Mya, and the Tellina of the North Cape ; 
and beneath all we detected grooved and dressed rock- 
surfaces, that bore their significant markings as freshly as 
if the grating ice had passed over them but yesterday. 
We would specially call the explorer's attention to the cor- 
roborative evidence borne by appearances of mechanical 
origin such as these to the mute testimony of the shells. 
We have already incidentally referred to the interesting 
deposits of Balnakaillie Bay. A stream falls into the sea 
at its upper extremity, and exhibits, in the section which 
it supplies, a bed charged with the old boreal shells, from 
where it creeps out along the beach, till where we lose it 
in the interior, far above the reach of the tide. As it 
passes inwards, we find the old coast line deposits resting 
over it ; in one place assuming the ordinary character of 
a stratified sand and gravel ; in another existing as a par- 
tially consolidated conglomerate ; while immediately be- 
neath it, on the north side of the stream, the rock appears 
strongly marked by the old glacial dressings. The me- 
chanical and zoologic evidences of the existence of a 
period of extreme cold thus lying side by side may be 
studied together. But the district has its many such ap- 
pearances. Not a few of the hills bear, in their rounded 
protuberances and smoothed and channelled hollows, evi- 
dence of the ice-agent that wasted them of old, and in 
the valley of the Gareloch, only a few miles distant, Mr. 



405 

Charles Maclaren found unequivocal traces of an ancient 
glacier. 

But the collateral evidences would lead us into a field 
quite as wide as that into which we have made our brief 
excursion, and are now preparing to leave. The following 
interesting extract from Mr. Kingsley's Glaucus, with 
which we conclude, may at once show how rightly to read 
these, and what very amusing reading they form. It is 
thus we find Mr. Kingsley accounting, in light and grace- 
ful dialogue, for the formation of a profoundly deep lochan 
of limited area, that opens its blue eye to the heavens 
amid the rough wilderness of rocks and hills that encircle 
the gigantic Snowclon. 

" You see the lake is nearly circular. On the side where 
we stand the pebbly beach is not six feet above the water, 
and slopes away steeply into the valley behind us, while 
before us it shelves gradually into the lake ; forty yards 
out, as you know, there is not ten feet of water, and then 
a steep bank, the edge whereof we and the big trout know 
well, sinks suddently to unknown depths. On the oppo- 
site side, that vast flat-topped wall of rock towers up 
shoreless into the sky seven hundred feet perpendicular. 
The deepest water of all, we know, is at its very foot. 
."Right and left two shoulders of down slope into the lake. 
Now turn round, and look down the gorge. Remark that 
the pebble bank on which we stand reaches some fifty 
yards downward. You see the loose stones peeping out 
everywhere. We may fairly suppose that we stand on a 
dam of loose stones, a hundred feet deep. 

"But why loose stones? and if so, what matter and 
what wonder ? There are rocks cropping out everywhere 
down the hill-side. 

"Because, if you will take up one of these stones, and 



406 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

crack it across, you will see that it is not of the same stuff 
as those said rocks. Step into the next field and see. 
That rock is the common Snowdon slate which we see 
everywhere. The two shoulders of down right and left 
are slate, too; you can see that at a glance. But the 
stones of the pebble bank are a close-grained, yellow-spot- 
ted Syenite; and where, — where on earth did these Syen- 
ite pebbles come from ? Let us walk round to the cliff on 
the opposite side and see. 

"Now mark. Between the cliff-foot and the sloping 
down is a crack, ending in a gully : the nearer side is of 
slate, and the further side the cliff itself. Why, the whole 
cliff is composed of the very same stone as the pebble 
ridge. 

"Now, my good friend, how did these pebbles get three 
hundred yards across the lake ? Hundreds of tons, some 
of them three feet long, — who carried them across? The 
old Cimbri were not likely to amuse themselves by making 
such a breakwater up here in No-man's-land, two thou- 
sand feet above the sea ; but somebody or something must 
have carried them, for stones do not fly, nor swim either. 

" Let our hope of a solution be in John Jones, who car- 
ried up the coracle. Hail him, and ask what is on the top 
of that cliff. So? — 'Plains, and bogs, and another linn.' 
Very good. Now, does it not strike you that the whole 
cliff has a remarkably smooth and plastered look, like a 
hare's run up an earth bank? And do you see that it is 
polished thus only over the lake ? that as soon as the 
cliff abuts on the downs right and left, it forms pinnacles, 
caves, broken angular boulders ? Syenite usually does so 
in our damp climate, from the weathering effect of frost 
and rain ; why has it not done so over the lake ? On that 
part something (giants perhaps) has been scrambling up 



a geologist's portfolio. 407 

and down on a very large scale, and so rubbed off every 
corner which was inclined to come away, till the solid core 
of the rock was bared. And may not these mysterious 
giants have had a hand in carrying the stones across the 
lake? . . . Really, I am not altogether jesting. Think 
awhile what agent could possibly have produced either 
one or both of these effects ? 

" There is but one ; and that, if you have been an 
Alpine traveller, much more if you have been a chamois- 
hunter, you have seen many a time (whether you knew it 
or not) at the very same work." 

"Ice! Yes: ice. Hrym in, the frost-giant, and no one 
else. And if you look at the facts, you will see how ice 
may have done it. Our friend John Jones's report of 
plains and bogs, and a lake above, makes it quite possible 
that in the ice-age (glacial epoch, as the big-word mongers 
call it), there was above that cliff a great neve or snow- 
field, such as you have seen often in the Alps at the head 
of each glacier. Over the face of this cliff a glacier had 
crawled down from that neve, polishing the face of the 
rock in its descent ; but the snow, having no large and 
deep outlet, has not slid down in a sufficient stream to 
reach the vale below, and form a glacier of the first order, 
and has therefore stopped short on the other side of the 
lake, as a glacier of the second order, which ends in an 
ice-cliff hanging high upon the mountain-side, and kept 
from farther progress by daily melting. If you have ever 
gone up the Mer-de-Glace to the Tacal, you saw a mag- 
nificent specimen of the sort on your right hand, just 
opposite the Tacal, in the Glacier de Trelaporte, which 
comes down from the Aiguille de Charmoz." 

"This explains our pebble ridge. The stones which 
the glacier rubbed off the cliff beneath it, it carried for- 



408 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

wards slowly, but surely, till they saw the light again in 
the face of the ice-cliff, and dropped out of it under the 
melting of the summer sun, to form a huge dam across the 
ravine; till, the 'ice-age' past, a more genial climate suc- 
ceeded, and neve and glacier melted away; but the 
'moraine' of stones did not, and remains to this day, the 
dam which keeps up the waters of the lake. 

" There is my explanation. If you can find a better, 
do ; but remember always that it must include an answer 
to, — ' How did the stones get across the lake ? ' " 



RECENT GEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES/ 



PREPARATIONS FOR THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION MEETING AT 
ABERDEEN IN 1859. 

The gentlemen of the hammer and chisel must imme- 
diately prepare a Reform Bill, and readjust their nomen- 
clature and classification. Both are uncouth and barbar- 
ous, as well as unscientific. Recent discoveries have 
unsettled almost every one of the characters and tests of 
the age of rocks. Old Werner's Transition class, though 
founded to some extent on facts, has been long ago dis- 
carded. But will hardness or crystalline structure, or the 
absence even of organic remains, hitherto described as the 
grand features of the primitive class of rocks, now bear 
to be trusted as essentialia of classification ! Every sum- 
mer's ramble multiplies proofs to the contrary. The mere 
vicinity of a trap-vein, squirted from its boiling caldron 
below, among the most sedimentary strata, has often baked 
them into hard crystalline masses, and converted mud- 
banks charged with shells into beautiful granular marble., 
as may be seen at Strath, in Skye, under the overlying 
igneous rocks of the Cuchullins. And perhaps the time is 
not far distant when it may be difficult to find in the crust 
of the globe any assemblage of rocks in which organisms 
may not be detected, although heat, for the most part, has 

* See Introductory Resume, p. 30. 
35 



410 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

nearly obliterated them. 1 Again, a little more patient 
investigation, we expect, will blow to the winds many a 
fine theory as to the gradual development of species, and 
will most likely show that at no former period was there 
an ocean replete with shells and worms low in the scale of 
organization, which had not on its shores a rich vegetation 
and a fauna abounding in reptiles, and perhaps birds and 
quadrupeds! Thus, when Hugh Miller wrote his "Old 
lied Sandstone," he described it as peculiarly a salt-water 
fish formation, in which there were scarcely any shells or 
vegetables, the faint traces of the latter which he had dis- 
covered being only markings of fucoids and similar sea- 
weeds. So far as then known, the Scottish Old Red 
Sandstone was the produce of a deep shoreless ocean, to 
which no decayed forests had been brought down by rains 
and rivers to become future coal-fields, nor on whose 

1 " The hypothesis," says Sir Roderick Murchison, in his newly-pub- 
lished edition of " Siluria," " that all the earliest sediments have been so 
altered as to have obliterated the traces of any relics of former life which 
may have been entombed in them, is opposed by examples of enormously 
thick and often finely levigated deposits beneath the lowest fossiliferous 
rocks, and in which, if many animal remains had ever existed, more 
traces of them would be detected." 

" And yet," as he again observes, " the fine aggregation and unaltered 
condition of those sediments have permitted the minutest impressions to 
be preserved. Thus, not only are the broad wave-marks distinct, but also 
those smaller ripples which may have been produced by wind, together 
with apparent rain-prints, as seen upon the muddy surface, and even 
cracks produced by the action of the sun on a half-dried surface. Again, 
as a further indication that these are littoral markings, and not the results 
of deep-sea currents, the minute holes left by the Annelides are most con- 
spicuous on the sheltered sides of the reptiles in each slab. 

" Surely, then, if animals of a higher organization had existed in this 
very ancient period, we should find their relics in this sediment, so admi- 
rably adapted for their conservation, as seen in the markings of the little 
arenicola, accompanied even by the traces of diurnal atmospheric action. " 
— " Siluria," pp. 20—27. L. M. 



a geologist's portfolio. 411 

margins and lagnnes disported the amphibious crocodile 
or other allied genera, who could leave the impress of 
their feet or tails on the soft mud or sand. The formation, 
in short, was considered very low down indeed, and near 
the base of the platform of rocks in which rest entombed 
the remains of the earliest races of organized creatures. 
But what have the discoveries of the last six months 
established ? Why, this, that the Old Red Sandstone of 
the east coast of Scotland is comparatively a modem 
formation, — much newer, at least, than the grand and 
lofty masses of the purple and red conglomerate of the 
western coast, which they so greatly resemble, but upon 
which Sir Roderick Murchison has now proved that an 
extensive series of crystalline quartz-rocks, limestones, and 
micaceous schists repose all greatly older than Hugh Mil- 
ler's fish-beds ! The discovery a few years ago of a little, 
frog-like, air breathing reptile in Morayshire (named the 
Telerpeton JEJlgine?ise), has been a bone of contention 
among the savans, because, according to past theories, it 
was not easy to admit that it could have lived at the date 
of the deposition of the Old Red Sandstone ; and hence 
very grave doubts were expressed about it, and much 
anxiety shown to establish that it belonged to the car- 
boniferous strata, or to a New Med Sandstone formation, 
which, if it did exist in our district, would be most valua- 
ble, from the salt and calcareous deposits in which it 
usually abounds. But within the last month or so, Sir 
Roderick Murchison, in company with the Rev. G. Gor- 
don, of Birnie, made transverse sections of the whole 
series of Morayshire freestones, from the edges of the 
micaceous schist in the interior, to the maritime promon- 
tories of Burghead and Lossiemouth, which convinced 
them that the whole red and yellowish sandstones of the 



412 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

province "are so bound together by mineral characters 
and fossil remains, that they must all be grouped as Old 
Red or Devonian? Nay, more than this, the views of the 
Director-General of the Geological Survey have been con- 
firmed and extended by the farther discovery of foot-prints 
in the Burghead sandstone, not only of a small reptile 
like the Telerpeton, but of very large creatures, that in 
their movements made enormous strides, and whose bushy 
tails have left trails more distinct than the largest seals or 
otters could do ! A well-known laborer in the English 
deposits (S. H. Beckles, Esq.), whose discoveries, in the 
Purbeck and Wealden beds, of the jaw-bones of most 
gigantic reptilia, have been extensive and most important, 
has recently examined the sandstone quarries at Burg- 
head and Covesea, where he has discovered the most 
undoubted foot-prints of both large and small animals ; 
and he has sent an extensive set of specimens to London, 
to be laid before the Geological Society at its winter meet- 
ings. Other foot-marks (each having the impression of 
three or four claws to it) have lately been seen by Sir 
Roderick, Mr. Martin, of Elgin, and Mr. Gordon, and 
specimens communicated by Mr. P. Duff; so that, in the 
language of Sir Roderick Murchison's announcement to 
the late meeting of the British Association at Leeds, " the 
presence of large reptiles, as well as of the little Telerpe- 
ton, in this upper member of the Old Red Sandstone, is 
completely established." 

We have not room enough at present to point out fur- 
ther deductions from these facts, and from the discovery, 
about three years ago, of Silurian fossils in the Southern 
Highlands and in Ayrshire. We allude to them only to 
show that, as in the days of Hutton and Playfair, the gran- 
ite veins which traverse in all directions the schists of Glen- 



413 

Tilt were the means of establishing the irruptive and 
igneous origin of granite, so Scotland again turns out to 
be the battle-field of our men of science, and that very 
great many things may be expected from the explorations 
which undoubtedly will be made, in connection with the 
next meeting of the association, to be held next autumn 
at Aberdeen, under the eye of the Prince Consort, and at 
which Sir Roderick Murchison, we are glad to understand, 
is to take his place as vice-president in all the sections. 
He is the senior of the three permanent trustees of the 
Association, and one of the founders of the body in 1831, 
of whom, strange to say, only five are now alive. In Sir 
David Brewster the science of the south of Scotland will 
be admirably represented and supported ; while Sir Rod- 
erick, a Ross-shire man, an alumnus of the Inverness Acad- 
emy (aye, and one who put shoulder to shoulder with the 
Highlanders on Corunna's bloody sod), will represent the 
land north of the Spey. 

If we might suggest to those who will take the lead in 
the arrangements for the Aberdeen meeting, we would say 
that they ought, in the geological section, to prepare for 
one excursion to Stonehaven, on the eastern coast, and 
another to Cromarty and Eathie, the scenes of Hugh Mil- 
ler's labors, on the north. 

In Stonehaven bay, and arising out of the harbor, may 
be seen large dykes of trap ascending the cliff and over- 
spreading the sandstone strata like the branches of a palm 
tree, and thence overflowing towards the very curious 
quartzose conglomerate at Dunnottar Castle. On the other 
or northern horn of the bay, irruptive or felspar rocks jut 
up in great masses and promontories, shifting and disturb- 
ing the sandstone strata; and immediately beyond, these 
latter give place to hard crystalline and vertical strata, as 

35* 



414 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

to which the Association will have to decide whether they 
are altered Silurian or true primitive rocks. 

At Cromarty, the local authorities, we think, should 
prepare for a visit from a large body of savans (which our 
railway and steamers will render easy), by exploring some 
new sections of the rocks on which Hugh Miller used to 
work. Many of these, it is well known, are below high- 
water mark, and are thus often covered by the sea ; while 
almost all the nodules containing fossil-fish have been ex- 
tracted and carried away. Some excavations in the strike 
or line of the same rocks should be made inland, the gravel 
and boulder-clay should be removed, a few layers of the 
sandstone underneath loosened, and a few broad sheets of 
the rock exposed in situ, and so left for the further exam- 
ination of visitors, without the natural dip or contents of 
the beds being at all interfered with. 

EXTRACT PROM "FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR," P. 199. 

In my little work on the " Old Red Sandstone," I have 
referred to an apparent lignite of the Lower Old Red of 
Cromarty, which presented, when viewed by the micro- 
scope, marks of the internal fibre. The surface, when 
under the glass, resembled, I said, a bundle of horse-hairs 
lying stretched in parallel lines ; and in this specimen alone, 
it was added, had I found aught in the Lower Old Red 
Sandstone approaching to proof of the existence of dry 
land. About four years ago, I had this lignite put strin- 
gently to the question by Mr. Sanderson ; and deeply inter- 
esting was the result. I must first mention, however, that 
there cannot rest the shadow of a doubt regarding the 
place of the organism in the geologic scale. It is unequiv- 
ocally a fossil of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. I found 



A geologist's portfolio. 415 

it partially imbedded, with many other nodules half-disin- 
terred by the sea, in an ichthyolitic deposit, a few hundred 
yards to the east of the town of Cromarty, which occurs 
more than four hundred feet over the Great Conglomerate 
base of the system. A nodule that lay immediately beside 
it contained a well-preserved specimen of the Coccosteus 
decipiens / and in the nodule in which the lignite itself is 
contained the practised eye may detect a scattered group 
of scales of Diplacantlxus, a scarce less characteristic 
organism of the lower formation. And what, asks the 
reader, is the character of this ancient vegetable, — the 
most ancient, by three whole formations, that has presented 
its internal structure to the microscope ? Is it as low in 
the scale of development as in the geological scale ? Does 
this venerable Adam of the forest appear, like the Adam 
of the infidel, as a squalid, ill-formed savage, with a rugged 
shaggy nature which it would require the suggestive neces- 
sities of many ages painfully to lick into civilization ? Or 
does it appear rather like the Adam of the poet and the 
theologian, independent, in its instantaneously-derived per- 
fection, of all after developments, — 

" Adam, the goodliest man of men since born 
His sons ? " 

Is this tissue vascular or cellular, or, like that of some of 
the cryptogamia, intermediate ? Or what, in fine, is the 
nature and bearing of its mute but emphatic testimony 
on that doctrine of progressive development 1 of late so 
strangely resuscitated ? 

In the first place, then, this ancient fossil is a true wood; 

1 This alludes, of course, to the development theory of the " Vestiges of 
the Natural History of Creation." 



416 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

— a dicotyledonous or polycotyledonous Gymno sperm,, 
that, like the pines and larches of our existing forests, bore 
naked seeds, which, in their state of germination, developed 
either double lobes to shelter the embryo within, or shot 
out a fringe of verticillate spikes, which performed the 
same protective functions, and that, as it increased in bulk 
year after year, received its accessions of growth in outside 
layers. In the transverse section the cells bear the reticu- 
lated appearance which distinguish the coniferae ; the lig- 
nite had been exposed in its bed to a considerable degree 
of pressure ; and so the openings somewhat resemble the 
meshes of a net that has been drawn a little awry ; but no 
general obliteration of their original character has taken 
place, save in minute patches, where they have been injured 
by compression or the bituminizing process. All the tubes 
indicated by the openings are, as in recent coniferae, of 
nearly the same size ; and though, as in many of the more 
ancient lignites, there are no indications of annual rings, 
the direction of the medullary rays is distinctly traceable. 
The longitudinal sections are rather less distinct than the 
transverse one : in the section parallel to the radius of the 
stem or bole the circular disks of the coniferae were at first 
not at all detected ; and, as since shown by a very fine 
microscope, they appear simply as double and triple lines 
of undefined dots, that somewhat resemble the stippled 
markings of the miniature painter ; nor are the openings 
of the medullary rays frequent in the tangental section (i. e. 
that parallel to the bark) ; but nothing can be better de- 
fined than the peculiar arrangement of the woody fibre, 
and the longitudinal form of the cells. Such is the char- 
acter of this the most ancient of lignites yet found that 
yields to the microscope the peculiarities of its original 



A geologist's portfolio. 417 

structure. We find in it an unfallen Adam — not a half- 
developed savage. 1 

The olive-leaf which the dove brought to Noah estab- 
lished at least three important facts, and indicated a few 
more. It showed most conclusively that there was dry- 
land, that there were olive-trees, and that the climate of 
the surrounding region, whatever change it may have un- 
dergone, was still favorable to the development of vegeta- 
ble life. And, further, it might be safely inferred from it, 
that if olive-trees had survived, other trees and plants must 
have survived also ; and that the dark muddy prominences 
round which the ebbing currents were fast sweeping to 
lower levels would soon present, as in antediluvian times, 
their coverings of cheerful green. The olive-leaf spoke 

1 On a point of such importance I find it necessary to strengthen my 
testimony by auxiliary evidence. The following is the judgment, on this 
ancient petrifaction, of Mr. Nicol, of Edinburgh, — confessedly one of our 
highest living authorities in that division of fossil botany which takes 
cognizance of the internal structure of lignites, and decides, from their 
anatomy, their race and family : 

" Edinburgh, 19th July 1845. 
" Dear Sir, — I have examined the structure of the fossil-wood which you 
found in the Old Red Sandstone at Cromarty, and have no hesitation in stating, 
that the reticulated texture of the transverse sections, though somewhat com- 
pressed, clearly indicates a coniferous origin; but as there is not the slightest 
trace of a disc to be seen in the longitudinal sections parallel to the medullary 
rays, it is impossible to say whether it belongs to the pine or araucarian division. 
I am, etc. William Nicol." 

It will be seen that Mr. Nicol failed to detect what I now deem the discs 
of this conifer, — those stippled markings to which I have referred. But 
even were this portion of the evidence wholly wanting, we would be left 
in doubt, in consequence, not whether the Old Red lignite formed part of 
a true gymnospermous tree, but whether that tree is now represented by 
the pines of Europe and America, or by the araucarians of Chili and New 
Zealand. Were I to risk an opinion in a department not particularly my 
province, it would be in favor of an araucarian relationship. 



418 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

not of merely a partial, but of a general vegetation. Now, 
the coniferous lignite of the Lower Old Red Sandstone we 
find charged, like the olive-leaf, with a various and sing- 
ularly interesting evidence. It is something to know, that 
in the times of the Coccosteus and Asterolepis there existed 
dry land, and that that land wore, as at after periods, its 
soft, gay mantle of green. It is something also to know, 
that the verdant tint was not owing to a profuse develop- 
ment of mere immaturities of the vegetable kingdom, — 
crisp, slow-growing lichens, or watery spore-propagated 
fungi, that shoot up to their full size in a night, — nor even 
to an abundance of the more highly organized families of 
the liverworts and the mosses. These may have abounded 
then, as now ; though we have not a shadow of evidence 
that they did. But while we have no proof whatever of 
their existence, we have conclusive proof that there existed 
orders and families of a rank far above them. On the dry 
land of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, on which, according 
to the theory of Adolphe Brogniart, nothing higher than a 
lichen or a moss could have been expected, the ship-car- 
penter might have hopefully taken axe in hand to explore 
the woods for some such stately pine as the one described 
by Milton, — 

" Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast 
Of some great admiral." 



SIR RODERICK MURCHISON 



ON THE 



RECENT GEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES IN MORAYSHIRE. 



At a meeting of the Geological Society of London, held 
on the 15th December 1858, Part III. of a paper by Sir 
Roderick Murchison, on " the Geological Structure of the 
North of Scotland," was read. 

Referring to his previous memoir for an account of the 
triple division of the Old Red Sandstone of Caithness and 
the Orkney Islands, Sir Roderick showed how the chief 
member of the group in those tracts diminished in its 
range southwards into Ross-shire, and how, when traceable 
through Inverness and Nairn, it was scarcely to be recog- 
nized in Morayshire, but reappeared, with its characteristic 
ichthyolites, in Banffshire (Dipple, Tynet, and Gamrie). 
He then prefaced his description of the ascending order of 
the strata belonging to this group in Morayshire by a 
sketch of the successive labors of geologists in that dis- 
trict ; pointing out how, in 1828, the sandstones and corn- 
stones of this tract had been shown by Professor Sedgwick 
and himself to constitute, together with the inferior Red 



420 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

Sandstone and conglomerate, one natural geological assem- 
blage ; that in 1839 the late Dr. Malcolmson made the im- . 
portant additional discovery of fossil fishes, in conjunction 
with Lady Gordon dimming; and also read a valuable 
memoir on the structure of the tract, before the Geolog- 
ical Society, of which, to his, the author's, regret, an ab- 
stract only had been published. — (Proc. Geol. Soc. vol. iii. 
p. 141.) Sir Roderick revisited the district in the autumn 
of 1840, and made sections in the environs of Forres and 
Elgin. Subsequently, Mr. P. Duff of Elgin published a 
" Sketch of the Geology of Moray," with illustrative plates 
of fossil-fishes, sections, and a geological map, by Mr. John 
Martin; and afterwards Mr. Alexander Robertson threw 
much light upon the structure of the district, particularly 
as regarded deposits younger than those under considera- 
tion. All these writers, as well as Sedgwick and himself, 
had grouped the yellow and whitish-yellow sandstones of 
Elgin with the Old Red Sandstone ; but the discovery in 
them of the curious small reptile the Telerpeton Elgin- 
ense, described by Mantell in 1851 from a specimen in Mr. 
P. Duff's collection, first occasioned doubts to arise respect- 
ing the age of the deposit. Still, the sections by Captain 
Brickenden, who sent that reptile up to London, proved 
that it had been found in a sandstone which dipped under 
"Cornstone," and which passed downwards into the Old 
Red series. Captain Brickenden also sent to London nat- 
ural impressions of the foot-prints of an apparently rep- 
tilian animal in a slab of similar sandstone, from the coast- 
ridge extending from Burghead to Lossiemouth (Cum- 
mingston). Although adhering to his original view re- 
specting the age of the sandstones, Sir R. Murchison could 
not help having misgivings and doubts, in common with 
many geologists, on account of the high grade of reptile 



421 

to which the Telerpeton belonged ; and hence he revisited 
the tract, examining the critical points, in company with 
his friend the Rev. G. Gordon, to whose zealous labors he 
owned himself to be greatly indebted. In looking through 
the collections in the public Museum of Elgin, and of Mr. 
P. Duff, he was much struck with the appearance of sev- 
eral undescribed fossils, apparently belonging to reptiles, 
which, by the liberality of their possessors, were, at his 
request, sent up for inspection to the Museum of Practical 
Geology. He was also much astonished at the state of 
preservation of a large bone {ischium) apparently belong- 
ing to a reptile, found by Mr. Martin in the same sand- 
stone quarries of Lossiemouth in which the scales or scutes 
of the Stagonolepis, described as belonging to a fish by 
Agassiz, had been found. On visiting these quarries, Mr. 
G. Gordon and himself fortunately discovered other bones 
of the same animal; and these, having been compared 
with the remains in the Elgin collections, have enabled 
Professor Huxley to decide that, with the exception of the 
Telerpeton, all these casts, scales, and bones belong to the 
reptile Stagonolepis Robertsoni. Sir Roderick, having 
visited the quarries in the coast-ridge, from which slabs 
with impressions of reptilian foot-marks had long been 
obtained, induced Mr. G. Gordon to transmit a variety of 
these, which are now in the Museum of Practical Geology, 
and of which some were exhibited at the meeting. 

After reviewing the whole succession of strata, from the 
edge of the crystalline rocks in the interior to the bold 
cliffs on the sea-coast, the author has satisfied himself that 
the reptile-bearing sandstones must be considered to form 
the uppermost portion of the Old Red Sandstone, or Dev- 
onian group, the following being among the chief reasons 
for his adherence to this view : — 1. That these sandstones 

36 



422 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES FROM 

have everywhere the same strike and dip as the inferior 
red sandstones containing Holoptychii and other Old Red 
ichthyolites, there being a perfect conformity between the 
two rocks, and a gradual passage from the one into the 
other. 2. That the yellow and light colors of the upper 
band are seen in natural sections to occur and alternate 
with red and green sandstones, marls, and conglomerates 
low down in the ichthyolitic series. 3. That while the 
concretionary limestones called " Corostones " are seen 
amidst some of the lowest red and green conglomerates, 
they reappear in a younger and broader zone at Elgin, 
and reoccur above the Telerpeton-stone at Spynie Hill, 
and above the Stagonolepis-sandstone of Lossiemouth; 
thus binding the whole into one natural physical group. 
4. That whilst the small patches of so-called "Wealden" 
or Oolitic strata, described by Mr. Robertson and others, 
occuring in this district, are wholly unconformable to, and 
rest upon, the eroded surfaces of all the rocks under con- 
sideration, so it was shown that none of the Oolitic or 
Liassic rocks of the opposite side of the Moray Frith, or 
those of Brora, Dunrobin, Eathie, etc., which are charged 
with Oolitic and Liassic remains, resemble the reptiliferous 
sandstones and " Cornstones" of Elgin, or their repetitions 
in the coast-ridge that extends from Burghead to Lossie- 
mouth. Fully aware of the great difficulty of determin- 
ing the exact boundary-line between the Uppermost Devo- 
nian and Lowest Carboniferous strata, and knowing that 
they pass into each other in many countries, the author 
stated that no one could dogmatically assert that the rep- 
tile-bearing sandstones might not, by future researches, be 
proved to form the commencement of the younger era. 

Sir Roderick concluded by stating that the conversion 
of the Stagonolepis into a reptile of high organization, 



a geologist's portfolio. 423 

though of nondescript characters, did not interfere 

WITH HIS LONG-CHERISHED OPINION FOUNDED ON AC- 
KNOWLEDGED FACTS AS TO THE PROGRESSIVE SUCCES- 
SION of great classes of animals, and that, inasmuch 
as the earliest trilobite of the invertebrate Lower Silurian 
era was as wonderfully organized as any living Crusta- 
cean, so it did not unsettle his belief to find that the earli- 
est reptiles yet recognized^ — the Stagonolepis and Telerpe- 
ton, — pertained to a high order of that class. 

At the same meeting, papers were read " On the Stago- 
nolepis JRobertsoni of the Elgin Sandstones, and on the 
Footmarks in the Sandstones of Cummingston," by Mr. T. 
H. Huxley ; as well as one " On Fossil Foot-prints in the 
Old Red Sandstones at Cummingston," by S. H. Beckles, 
Esq. 



THE END. 



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The Better Land ; OK the believer's 

Journey and Future Home. By Rev. A. 
C. Thompson. 12mo. Cloth, S5c. 

Kitto's History of Palestine, from the 

Patriarchal Age to the Present Time. With 
200 Illustrations. Lmo. Cloth, $1.25. 
An admirable work for the Family, the Sab- 
bath and week-day School Library." 

The Priest and the Huguenot; or, 

Persecution in the Age of Louis XY. 
From the French of L. F. Bungener. 
Two vols., I2mo. Cloth, $2.25. 
This is not only a work of thrilling interest, 
but is a masterly Protestant production. 

The Psalmist. A Collection of Hymns for 
the Use of Baptist Churches. By Baron 
Stow and S. F. Smith. With a Supple- 
ment, containing an Additional Selection 
of Hymns, by Richard Fuller, D. D., 
and J. B. Jeter, D. D. Published in vari- 
ous sizes, and styles of binding. 
This is unquestionably the best collection 

of Hymns in the English language. 



(10) 



WORKS OF HUGH MILLER. 

THE OLD RED SANDSTONE ; or, New "Walks in an Old Field. Illustrated 
with Plates and Geological Sections. New Edition, Revised and much Enlarged, 
by the addition of new matter and new Illustrations, etc. 12mo, cloth, $1.25. 

This edition contains over one hundred pages of entirely new matter, from the pen of Hugh 
Miller. It contains, also, several additional new plates and cuts, the old plates re-engraved and 
improved, and an Appendix of new Notes. 

" It is withal one of the most beautiful specimens of English composition to be found, convey- 
ing information on a most difficult and profound science, in a style at once novel, pleasing, and 
elegant."— DR. Sprague — Albany Spectator. 

THE FOOT-PRINTS OP THE CREATOR; or, the Asterolepis of Strom- 
ness, with numerous Illustrations. With a Memoir of the Author, by Louis Agassiz. 
12mo, cloth, $1.00. 

Dr. Buckland said he would give his left hand t» possess such power of description as this man, 

TESTIMONY OP THE ROCKS; or, Geology in its Bearings on the two 
Theologies, Natural and Revealed. "Thou shalt be in league with the stones of the 
field." — Job. With numerous elegant Illustrations. One volume, royal 12mo, cloth, 
$1.25. 

This is the largest and most comprehensive Geological Work that the distinguished author has 
yet published. It exhibits the profound learning, the felicitous style, and the scientific perception, 
which characterize his former w«ks, while it embraces the latest results of geological discovery. 
But the great charm of the book lies in those passages of glowing eloquence, in which, having 
spread out his facts, the author proceeds to make deductions from them of the most striking and 
exciting character. The work is profusely illustrated by engravings executed at Paris, in the highest 
style of French art. 

THE CRTJISE OP THE BETSEY; or, a Summer Ramble among the Fossil- 
iferous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist ; or, Ten Thousand 
Miles over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland. 12mo, cloth, $1.25. 

Nothing need be said of it save that it possesses the same fascination for the reader that charac- 
terizes the author's other works. 

MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; or, the Story of my Educa, 
tion. An Autobiography. With a full-length Portrait of the Author. 12mo, cloth, 
$1.25. 

This is a personal narrative, of a deeply interesting and instructive character, concerning one of 
the most remarkable men of the age. 

MY PIRST IMPRESSIONS OP ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 

With a fine Engraving of the author. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. 

O^- A very instructive book of travels, presenting the most perfectly life-like views of England 
and its people to be found in any language. 

tgfr" The above six volumes are furnished in sets, printed and bound in uniform style : viz., 

HUGH MILLER'S "WORKS, Six Volumes. Elegant embossed cloth, $7.00) 
library sheep, $8.00 ; half calf, $12.00 ; antique, $12.00. 

MACAULAY ON SCOTLAND. A Critique, from the "Witness." 16m<v 
flexible cloth, 25 cts. (28) 



IMPORTANT NEW WORKS. 

CYCLOPAEDIA OF ANECDOTES OP LITERATURE AND 

THE PINE ARTS. Containing a copious and choice Selection of Anecdotes 
of the various forms of Literature, of the Arts, of Architecture, Engravings, Music, 
Poetry, Painting, and Sculpture, and of the most celebrated Literary Characters and 
Artists of different Countries and Ages, &c. By Kazlitt Arvine, A. M., author of 
" Cyclopaedia of Moral and Religious Anecdotes." With numerous Illustrations. 725 pp. 
octavo. Cloth, $3.00 ; sheep, $3.50 ; cloth, gilt, $4.00 ; half calf, $4.00. 

This is unquestionably the choicest collection of Anecdotes ever published. It contains three 
thousand and forty Anecdotes : and such is the wonderful variety, that it will be found an almost 
inexhaustible fund of interest for every class of readers. The elaborate classification and Indexes 
must commend it especially to public speakers, to the various classes of literary and scientific men, 
to artists, mechanics, and others, as a Dictionary for reference, in relation to facts on the num- 
berless subjects and characters introduced. There are also more than one hundred and fifty fine 
Illustrations. 

THE LIFE OP JOHN MILTON, Narrated in Connection with the Political, 
Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. By David Masson, M.A., Professor 
of English Literature, University College, London. Vol. i., embracing the period from 
1608 to 1639. With Portraits, and specimens of his handwriting at different periods. 
Royal octavo, cloth, $0.00. 

This important work will embrace three royal octavo volumes. By special arrangement with 
Prof. Masson, the author, G. & L. are permitted to print from advance sheets furnished them, as 
the authorized American publishers of this magnificent and eagerly looked for work. Volumes two 
and three will follow in due time ; but, as each volume covers a definite period of time, and also 
embraces distinct topics of discussion or history, they will be published and 6old independent of 
each other, or furnished in sets when the three volumes are completed. 

THE GREYSON LETTERS. Selections from the Correspondence of R. E. H. 
Gkeyson, Esq. Edited by Henry Rogers, author of " Eclipse of Faith." 12mo, cloth, 

$1.25. 

" Mr. Greyson and Mr. Rogers are one and tho same person. The whole work is from his pen, 
and every letter is radiant with the genius of the author. It discusses a wide range of subjects, in 
the most attractive manner. It abounds in the keenest wit and humor, satire and logic. It fairly 
entitles Mr. Rogers to rank with Sydney Smith and Charles Lamb as a wit and humorist, and with 
Bishop Butler as a reasoner. Mr. Rogers' name will share with those of Butler and Pascal, in the 
gratitude and veneration of posterity." — London Quarterly. 

" A book not for one hour, but for all hours ; not for one mood, but for every mood ; to think 
over, to dream over, to laugh over." — Boston Journal. 

" The Letters are intellectual gems, radiant with beauty, happily intermingling the grave and 
the gay. — Christian Observer. 

ESSAYS IN BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM. By Peter Bayne, M. 
A., author of "The Christian Life, Social and Individual." Arranged in two Series, or 
Parts. 12mo, cloth, each, $1.25. 

These volumes have been prepared by the author exclusively for his American publishers, and 
are now published in uniform style. They include nineteen articles, viz. : 

First Series : — Thomas De Quincy. — Tennyson and his Teachers. —Mrs. Barrett Brown-, 
ing. — Recent Aspects of British Art. —John Ruskin. — Hugh Miller. — The Modern Novel; 
Dickens, &c. — Ellis, Acton, and Currer Bell. 

Second Series :— Charles Kingsley. — S. T. Coleridge.— T. B. Maeaulay. — Alison.-- Wel- 
lington.— Napoleon.— Plato. —Characteristics of Christian Civilization. — The Modern University. 
- The Pulpit and the Press. — Testimony of the Rocks : a Defence. 

VISITS TO EUROPEAN CELEBRITIES. By the Rev. William B. 

Sprague, D. D. 12mo, cloth, $1.00 ; cloth, gilt, $1.50. 

A series of graphic and life-like Personal Sketches of many of the most distinguished men and 
women of Europe, portrayed as the Author saw them in their own homes, and under the most 
advantageous circumstances. Besides these " pen and ink " sketches, tho work contains the novel 
attraction of & facsimile of the sianature of each of the persons introduced. (2 8) 



